There are some interesting replies in that thread, eg:
http://lists.freepascal.org/fpc-pascal/2016-June/048216.html
http://lists.freepascal.org/fpc-pascal/2016-June/048217.html
FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
91–100 of 109 posts
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hadn't heard of this book before, so I found it: "FreePascal from Square One". http://www.copperwood.com/pub/FreePascalSquareOne--08-06-201...
Cool, just downloaded it - thanks. Had a quick look at the book. He says: "Yessir, the book you’re reading has been around the block a few times since I began writing it in November of 1983—which I boggle to think was over thirty years ago. It’s been through four print editions and on paper sold over 125,000 copies. It’s been translated into five languages." I had said recently, here (in another HN thread): https://n…
Another tidbit from the introduction: "It’s tough to stay ahead in this business. Turbo Pascal 5.5 appeared in May of 1989, largely as a response to Microsoft’s totally unexpected (but now long-forgotten) QuickPascal. V5.5 brought with it the new dazzle of object-oriented programming, and while I did write the V5.5 OOP Guide
manual that Borland published with the V5.5 product I chose to pass on updating Complete Turbo Pascal for either V5.5 or V6.0."
Not to mention: "I mention all this history because I want people to understand where FreePascal from Square One came from, emphasizing that it’s been a work in progress for thirty years. Why stop now? I don’t have to cater to publishers, paper costs, print runs, or release schedules anymore. The book can evolve with the compiler, and every so often you can download the latest update. My publishing company Copperwood Press offers a print-on-demand paper edition if you’d like one, but you can print it yourself if you prefer. That’s how technical publishing ought to be, and someday will be."
Bravo! If this was how copyright worked - that someone could make a (presumably) decent living for a few years, and the give it all away - would not have as much issues with the intellectual property lobby and Micky Mouse extensions.
Either way, I think it is fantastic to see someone liberating a project of 30 years like this!
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you ever look at Oberon?
It's what Pascal should have become IMHO. Base syntax: case-insensitive Oberon. Extensions: Object Pascal features. Now that's heaven. If only we don't need to maintain backward compatibility...
I wonder how hard it would be to poach the best parts of the GUI system from Lazarus and put it into a Turbo Oberon system.
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Jeff Duntemann is writing new intro books and releasing then under a Creative Commons license iirc. I remember his name as a computer book author from older PC days and mags/books, but have forgotten what he used to write about. Did he write about C or Pascal, say Turbo Pascal, earlier too? Just saw his site ( http://www.duntemann.com/ ) and it seems to show only assembly language books (on a quick look). Not that i…
Jeff wrote about Pascal quite a bit in his columns, as well as some books. He wrote about anything he found interesting, but Pascal was his weapon of choice for most things so he covered it pretty well over the years.
Good to know.
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Jeff Duntemann is writing new intro books and releasing then under a Creative Commons license iirc. I remember his name as a computer book author from older PC days and mags/books, but have forgotten what he used to write about. Did he write about C or Pascal, say Turbo Pascal, earlier too? Just saw his site ( http://www.duntemann.com/ ) and it seems to show only assembly language books (on a quick look). Not that i…
I posted a link to the Foundation's Web site to Jeff's Facebook page. (He's been busy getting his house in Colorado Springs ready to sell, as he and his wife are moving to Phoenix for health reasons. Facebook is about all he has time to check these days.) I'll also link this HN comment thread to him. Jeff's blog is at http://www.contrapositivediary.com/ , and he updates that more frequently than his main Web site. (W…
Thanks, will check his blog.
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Jeff Duntemann is writing new intro books and releasing then under a Creative Commons license iirc. I remember his name as a computer book author from older PC days and mags/books, but have forgotten what he used to write about. Did he write about C or Pascal, say Turbo Pascal, earlier too? Just saw his site ( http://www.duntemann.com/ ) and it seems to show only assembly language books (on a quick look). Not that i…
Yep, Duntemann is the author of Complete Turbo Pascal from the 80's. It's a bit of a door-stopper, but it was one of the first programming books I ever read as a kid, and I have vague memories of it being a great introduction to software design in general.
Ha, I remember those big books. The Waite Group's "Microsoft C Bible" (by Nabajyoti Barkakati - my uncle brought it for me as a present on one of his visits), and many others ...
In those days many of those topics were new - being the early-ish days of the PC revolution - and Internet (and hence online docs) was less prevalent, so those books served a real need, despite the size. I remember reading the Turbo Pascal manual cover to cover, the DOS Tech Ref manual and many others too. Calling the DOS equivalent of Unix system calls (i.e. interrupt 21H calls) and so on, from TP, TC and sometimes assembly - using just DEBUG.EXE's A (Assemble) command. Good fun and learning ...
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, just downloaded it - thanks. Had a quick look at the book. He says: "Yessir, the book you’re reading has been around the block a few times since I began writing it in November of 1983—which I boggle to think was over thirty years ago. It’s been through four print editions and on paper sold over 125,000 copies. It’s been translated into five languages." I had said recently, here (in another HN thread): https://n…
Just calling out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12047005 in case you missed it :-)
Thanks :)
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, just downloaded it - thanks. Had a quick look at the book. He says: "Yessir, the book you’re reading has been around the block a few times since I began writing it in November of 1983—which I boggle to think was over thirty years ago. It’s been through four print editions and on paper sold over 125,000 copies. It’s been translated into five languages." I had said recently, here (in another HN thread): https://n…
He'd probably appreciate it more if you made his science fiction books hits, as he's been trying to get back into SF writing recently, and has joined the indie publishing revolution (after getting talked into it by Sarah Hoyt). Available on Kindle Unlimited: his novel The Cunning Blood [0], a newer novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities [1], and his collection Souls in Silicon: Tales of AI Confronting The Infinite. [2] More…
Interesting, will take a look; thanks.
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inside Lazarus, go to the 'help' menu and select 'help'. There's quite a lot of documentation! There's also context sensitive help. Put the text cursor over a type name, like 'TForm' in the default code that's there when you start Lazarus. Press F1 to see the documentation for that type.
I just checked. Help shows documentation on FreePascal and what the different options are for Lazarus as an IDE, but I don't see any more documentation on how the GUI system works, which is supposed to be what makes this system so special in the first place.
>but I don't see any more documentation on how the GUI system works
What exactly do you mean by that? At a shallow level, it should be fairly obvious - it would be like any other event-driven GUI development environment - create and place widgets on a window, set their properties, write routines that respond to (keyboard and mouse) events, build and start the app, the event loop takes over, your routines get triggered by events and do stuff, etc. Are you looking for more depth, maybe on the internals? Asking out of interest in the question and answer myself.
But I'm not sure you need a lot of that depth to start using it. Just looking at some basic code examples, and using the online help as a nearby comment said, should give enough information on Free Pascal and Lazarus widgets, their inheritance hierarchy, their properties and events to which you can respond, etc. I know this because I have followed such an approach in other GUI environments, e.g. wxPython, after learning the basics of event-driven GUI programming, from my first such GUI env, and managed to get some work done.
Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just checked. Help shows documentation on FreePascal and what the different options are for Lazarus as an IDE, but I don't see any more documentation on how the GUI system works, which is supposed to be what makes this system so special in the first place.
>but I don't see any more documentation on how the GUI system works What exactly do you mean by that? At a shallow level, it should be fairly obvious - it would be like any other event-driven GUI development environment - create and place widgets on a window, set their properties, write routines that respond to (keyboard and mouse) events, build and start the app, the event loop takes over, your routines get triggere…
I mean docs that assume I've never looked at any other GUI system and don't know what an event even is, much less how to register one.
What if I'm a first-time programmer or have only ever programmed in MIT Scratch? What if I'm a PHP programmer? Do the Lazarus components work like Swing? Do you register event handling the same way?
I want tons of examples for every component--examples that start simple and work up in terms of complexity with comprehensive explanation along the way and I want it all linked under "Documentation" off the front page.
Now that's a lot. I recognize that. But I don't care. There are whole books available for Swing, JavaFX, Windows Forms, and WPF, not to mention Web Design. That's the standard today. Book scale documentation...
I'll say it again: I'd like to use Lazarus. I spent the morning programming a desktop application that could have been done in Lazarus, but it wasn't because I'd rather build programs than decipher an undocumented system, and I suspect I'm not alone.