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Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

getlazarus.org

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Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#51

I've been using Lazarus 2.6 for a free time project since August as I've used Delphi 1.0 in the early nineties and I wanted to see if this was any good. I've been blow away with it, it's Delphi brought from the dead :) It has been a real pleasure to use and I've come to appreciate the productivity that it brings, as this open source IDE is on par with what I remembered from early Delphi versions and, amazingly, I fee…

...Delphi's not dead - see http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi, now it's cross platform, modern language features - generics, lambdas etc etc. Writing a Mac app in it right now :-)

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#52
post #50
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest they should teach JavaScript instead of Python in highschools. Websites ('web apps'..) are a big deal in, atleast, teenager's life, so they could atleast install Tampermonkey plugin and script some functionality for their favorite websites. Meanwhile after learning python if you won't work in IT is useless. Plus requirement to install Python, include python in PATH and use CMD to launch .py scripts is a…

That's a very Windows-centric view of the world. Macs are increasing popular in education and come with Python pre-installed. Linux comes with Python pre-installed. iOS / Android require installing an app to do local programming either way, and I'd argue the Python writing apps are better than their javascript writing apps. Microsoft should fix the "bug" that its operating system is missing interpreters for Perl, Pyt…

Microsoft includes VBScript and JScript interpreters -- WScript and CScript. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Script_Host

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#53
post #50
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest they should teach JavaScript instead of Python in highschools. Websites ('web apps'..) are a big deal in, atleast, teenager's life, so they could atleast install Tampermonkey plugin and script some functionality for their favorite websites. Meanwhile after learning python if you won't work in IT is useless. Plus requirement to install Python, include python in PATH and use CMD to launch .py scripts is a…

That's a very Windows-centric view of the world. Macs are increasing popular in education and come with Python pre-installed. Linux comes with Python pre-installed. iOS / Android require installing an app to do local programming either way, and I'd argue the Python writing apps are better than their javascript writing apps. Microsoft should fix the "bug" that its operating system is missing interpreters for Perl, Pyt…

Windows actually has a Javascript (well, the JScript dialect of ECMAScript) interpreter out of the box in the form of Windows Script Host. It also supports VBScript. You can play with it on the command line using the cscript command.

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#54
post #51

I've been using Lazarus 2.6 for a free time project since August as I've used Delphi 1.0 in the early nineties and I wanted to see if this was any good. I've been blow away with it, it's Delphi brought from the dead :) It has been a real pleasure to use and I've come to appreciate the productivity that it brings, as this open source IDE is on par with what I remembered from early Delphi versions and, amazingly, I fee…

...Delphi's not dead - see http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi , now it's cross platform, modern language features - generics, lambdas etc etc. Writing a Mac app in it right now :-)

"cross platform" to whatever they feel like. I remember in college my teacher bought the new version for that. Turned out "Native Android support" was phonegap which isn't native.

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#55
post #51

I've been using Lazarus 2.6 for a free time project since August as I've used Delphi 1.0 in the early nineties and I wanted to see if this was any good. I've been blow away with it, it's Delphi brought from the dead :) It has been a real pleasure to use and I've come to appreciate the productivity that it brings, as this open source IDE is on par with what I remembered from early Delphi versions and, amazingly, I fee…

...Delphi's not dead - see http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi , now it's cross platform, modern language features - generics, lambdas etc etc. Writing a Mac app in it right now :-)

You're right, I didn't intend to state that it was :)

After starting to use lazarus, I've seen the youtube tutorials by Embarcadero on Delphi 10 targeting mobile apps and it looks like a very productive environment: https://www.youtube.com/user/EmbarcaderoTechNet/playlists

I just find the price tag for the current delphi way too steep (+5k usd?) and I think that was part of decline of the suite.

Being able to target linux GUI is really relevant for me and freepascal + lazarus provides that. Delphi doesn't.

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#56
Free Pascal in my limited experience has been ironically better than the commercial Delphi.

FPC has the ability to read arrow keys from a CLI, Delphi required some awful lump of Win32 code. Oh and FPC actually generated numbers random enough to make a simple game of Tic Tac To work :')

(Delphi did not, making the game unplayable without adding my own version of a random number generator)

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#57
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's better built then why hasn't had the same success? What are your metrics for "better"? What does "more modern" mean exactly? I don't see that there's much value in pursuing design or implementation purity if the software isn't getting the same end user take-up.

The Delphi app has been continuously "enriched" with features and special cases, based on direct feature requests for each client that requested one. This has lead to the case where there are several thousands switches which need to work together, in every combination possible. They don't always work, by the way. The new app has selected the more relevant use cases and could be better structured and implemented. Mode…

It smells like the web app still has that new car smell. I'd guess that the web app will go through the same process of enrichment. The web app will get the special cases and direct feature requests and will eventually arrive at a similar state as the old application for similar reasons, just in a different implementation.

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#58
post #6

Do people code in Pascal still?! I remember it from years ago in high school and it seemed like it was already ancient then. Nothing against the language itself, it was straightforward and easy to learn on. Just surprised to see a new compiler for it coming out.

I used it a few months ago to develop some HPC code for analyzing the timelines of a cosmological instrument (ESA Planck/LFI), and I was quite happy with the result. I even wrote a blog post about my experience ( http://ziotom78.blogspot.fr/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-f... ).

Nice to read this. I also created a fpc wrapper for cfitsio, but never published it as I thought it would have a limited interest.

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#59
post #14

Glad to hear FPC is still well alive and kicking. BTW, AFAIK Wirth's work is not limited to Pascal (there are Oberon and Modula, for example). Wonder why those languages don't gain as much exposure as Pascal does?

It's not like Pascal has an insane amount of exposure, I fail to remember any news here that wasn't about a new FPC/Lazarus release. Whereas the Oberon/Modula compiler space seems pretty defunct. And sadly, the same is true for Modula-3, the language that could've been a better Java/C#...

The only other language from the family that one reads about here (very) occasionally is Ada.

Unless one counts Go as some kind of Algol68-Ratfor.

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#60
The Lazarus IDE and GUI component library is simply fantastic, and the most productive native cross-platform GUI toolkit for the big three desktop OSes (OS X/Windows/Linux) that you'll probably find.

We needed small helper tool developed as a cross platform desktop app at the university recently, and had an extremely rewarding experience developing it in Lazarus/FPC:

After building the app on Ubuntu, I opened my Windows virtual machine, imported the project, and pressed "Run", and I had a working native windows application, without a single change! (Only on OS/X, there were some missing import of cthreads or something, that needed to be added, amounting to 1LOC).

Based on this, today, to anyone developing native cross-platform desktop apps, my number 1 recommendation is Lazarus.

Btw, I find the new JVM and Dalvik [1] and Android [2] targets very very interesting!

[1] http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_...

[2] http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_...

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