Hi William

thanks again for responding - I"m very grateful for all the advice you and 
the others are offering

thanks for the clarification about regular expression

I keep hearing C over and over, and have to admit that I have an ingrained 
dislike for C ( probably irrational , so I should put that aside and take 
another look ).  thanks

You're ( largely ) right about the bloat caused by high level languages, 
BUT I think that concern is less important now (with today's fast 
processors with huge memory) than it was in the old days ( when everything 
was slow, huge, and expensive ).  Even 40 years ago we realized that the 
advantages in codability and maintainablility more than outweighed the 
value of saving a few processing cycles or bytes of memory/storage.  So, I 
feel it's even more inportant now than before because the cost of coders 
greatly outweighs the cost of memory and/or processing, so I"ll keep hoping 
for a high-level language that can be used with the BBB.

You're absolutely right about bad coders writing bad code regardless of the 
language.

It's interesting that you talk about FreeBasic  I happen to think that 
Basic is a good language.  the old QuickBasic was the closest PC language 
that I ever found to get close to mainframe PL/1 ( which in my opinion was 
the best language ever. The last major project I led generated a system 
that was about 15million lines of code which was still running about 30 
years later ( last I heard ) and it was written in PL/1.  I'm still hoping 
to find something that good in the 'new world'.

again, I appreciate your help and respect your viewpoint
richard

On Monday, March 9, 2015 at 11:00:36 PM UTC-4, William Hermans wrote:
>
> Richard, I can not state it any better than wikipedia ( regular expression 
> ).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
>
> Basically like wildcards, but much more powerful. Now as to whether or not 
> just using "regex" represents "strong array handling" . . . again that 
> depends on your definition.
>
> When I mentioned a web UI backend above that was just an example, but what 
> you're describing seems to fit C very closely, No, C is not high level, but 
> as long as C has been around, you can almost guarantee you'll be able to 
> find a library that will work for you. An executable compiled from C can 
> also be very compact, and super fast.
>
> Now for sure, an inexperienced developer can write bad code in C, however 
> this is true of any language. Possibly more so with C, since it is a very 
> powerful language. A language that also demands you understand what your 
> code does. But again . . . this is true for all programing languages out 
> there.
>
> Easy to maintain ? Bug free code ? This is all the responsibility of the 
> developer(s) using any language. 
>
> I would also consider how much bloat many of these high level languages 
> add to an executable when compiled.
>
> With all the above said, one other language did come to mind after 
> thinking about it a bit. FreeBasic, but I've never used it. So I have no 
> idea what the BCL ( base class library ) is like, and no idea how many 
> libraries exist for it. It is one of the few languages I hear of now and 
> again, but have never looked in to. Mostly because I try to distance myself 
> from any form of basic when possible. Funny that back in the  early 90's 
> the first languages I started with was quickbasic . . .
>
> On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 5:32 PM, richard.leverton <[email protected] 
> <javascript:>> wrote:
>
>> Hi Harvey
>>
>> thanks for the tip, and thanks for taking the time to help me
>>
>> regards
>> richard
>>
>>
>> On Monday, March 9, 2015 at 8:02:29 PM UTC-4, Harvey White wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, 9 Mar 2015 16:48:04 -0700 (PDT), you wrote: 
>>>
>>> >I'd suggest taking a look at Free Pascal.  It's well supported and can 
>>> be 
>>> >compiled and cross-compiled on a number of different platforms 
>>> including 
>>> >the BBB.   It also enjoys a wide range of libraries and a good and 
>>> active 
>>> >support forum.  You can get an idea of capabilities by visiting the 
>>> Lazarus 
>>> >website:   http://www.lazarus-ide.org .  Lazarus supports rapid 
>>> application 
>>> >development and is built *on top* of free pascal.  Free pascal itself 
>>> can 
>>> >be run in a command line mode that disposes of all of the overhead that 
>>> >goes with an elaborate GUI.   This makes it well suited to applications 
>>> >that don't require a lot of man-machine interaction. 
>>>
>>> Lazarus also provides a GUI.   
>>> > 
>>> >Array handling is not integral to the Pascal language, but you will 
>>> find a 
>>> >broad assortment of math libraries, some more optimized than others, 
>>> that 
>>> >are written in the language. 
>>> > 
>>> >Both the Free Pascal Compiler and Lazarus are open-source and available 
>>> for 
>>> >free download on the internet.    I've used both on an RPi, but have 
>>> been 
>>> >using C++ for now on my BBB.  C++ has the advantage of being supported 
>>> by 
>>> >the the Eclipse IDE.  You can use C++, of course, without exploiting 
>>> it's 
>>> >OOP capabilities. 
>>> > 
>>>
>>> I thought that the support for the cross compiled environment that we 
>>> need for the BBB was lacking in Lazarus, good to hear that it is not. 
>>>
>>> Had you made GUI applications with Lazarus?  It would be good to know. 
>>> Then there's still the library support for the hardware, though, but 
>>> Pascal can call C++ routines, IIRC. 
>>>
>>> Harvey 
>>>
>>> > 
>>> >   
>>> > 
>>>
>>>  -- 
>> For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss
>> --- 
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
>> "BeagleBoard" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an 
>> email to [email protected] <javascript:>.
>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>>
>
>

-- 
For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss
--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"BeagleBoard" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to