My first love as a language is Pascal as well. It represents everything that you need to know about to be a (hopefully) good programmer... structure, versatility etc etc.
Initially I got involved with Borland C at the same time as Turbo Pascal but it was just so damned long winded to get anything running I concentrated on TP probably due the fact that I had always done Pascal at University along with Algol 60 (Like Pascal) if anyone remembers that on a Leo Marconi KDF-9 mainframe!! As for CA, they really screwed when they moved from Clipper (Summer 87 and Ver 5.3c) to Visual Objects. I remember going to the launch in London and it was all just too much to take in, and didn't actually offer the developer any advantages other than more coding to do!. I managed a couple of projects in it and then they damned well dropped the whole lot and brought out Visual Objects Version 2 which didn't just move the goalposts but dug up the whole playing field as well. Needless to say, VO was bulky and expensive to buy and had far to many bugs to use in the real world as a development platform. I stuck to Clipper 5.3 and Blinker as the linker which just worked ... and very fast along with a few addons which allowed you to use either Clipper or Dbase indexes. At the same time I had used Foxplus extensively and just gravitated towards Fox as a company, carefully avoiding Foxpro for windows and sticking with Foxpro V2.6 for a long time before VFP came out!!! As for Dbase II and its derivatives, I think that Ashton Tate lost the plot totally after Dbase III, especially getting involved in the famous Framework II and subsequently Framework III. RBase looked to be a good development platform at the time but seemed to peter out somehow, probably because of its expensive "per user" runtime. I never did much work in Microsoft Basic (or GWBasic as it was also called) but did look at Digital Research's CBasic that was like a cross between Pascal and Basic, mainly because it had a compiler, unlike the Microsoft product. As for VB4 I took a look at but by that time I was deeply entrenched in Visual Foxpro both on the Mac and PC. Oh, and just for a bit of a hoot I fired up TP3 and the later offering Turbo Pascal 6 (first to use OOPS) on my quad core Windows 7 box last night and talk about fast!!!! As for Delphi, I have always had the current version, as I do of the Rad Studio XE. It's also blindingly fast and has cross platform support as well but somehow seems to be far to "expansive" in terms of documentation. It seems that it is impossible to "learn" a language these days as we have done with VFP, mainly bacause the "Language" has become a sett of procedural calls to outside libraries and it is those that are so huge. Still, that's progress for you... or is it? Dave -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Publius Maximus Sent: 01 November 2011 21:55 To: ProFox Email List Subject: Re: [NF] 25 years .... gone I still love Pascal and have, mainly as a spiritual exercise, maintained my subscription to Delphi through the various cruel aeons of its history, particularly since Anders Hejlsberg bailed Borland for the Dark Side. RAD Studio XE2 is quite nice... I really like the additions to the Delphi language that Embarcadero has introduced since Delphi 2009, and FireMonkey is an interesting new direction for them, allowing for native compiling of beautiful 3D and 2D applications on both Windows & Mac. And so, every now and again, I fart in the general direction of the nanny runtimes and build native software for my own amusement (and an occasional quick buck) using Object Pascal. FireMonkey has even tempted me to revive my old Muse project -- an attempt to take the idea behind FoxPro to the cloud. But everybody's doing that already and I find natural language processing and data visualization much more interesting and personally gratifying. I could never figure out how Visual Basic beat it, or how C++ survived its advent, but then, we all know well that the best technology doesn't always win in the Big Game. The god of this world much prefers a fantastic farce to the real deal. And so it goes. - Publius _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
