Hi all,
Not long ago, I mentioned that I wanted to do a raspberry pi project and
I was considering various programming languages. I chose free pascal
because they have a compile once run on anything design philosophy.
It's pretty much true. You really can run it on almost anything. The
compiler, debugger, and Lazarus GUI ide can run natively on the Pi. I
was perusing the docs tonight and found out that there is another IDE,
text based, built into the free pascal system. That can run on
essentially anything with a terminal window, whether a GUI desktop
environment is running or not. I downloaded the docs in the form of
several pdf's. When I started looking over them, my jaw almost fell to
the floor. The total documentation, not including any tutorials or web
pages or wiki's, or whatever, is 3153 pages. The reference manual for
the run time library alone is 1780 pages. Now, I haven't written a
single line of code yet. Not even "hello world" other than the one I
did 30 years ago in college. But, if the quality of the code is
comparable to the apparent quality of the docs, I'm very impressed. I'm
starting to think I could really build almost anything with this
system. That it's this comprehensive and that it's open source and free
is amazing. I'm getting more excited about learning it, although,
whether it would ever lead to any job possibilities, who knows. The
language is so old (although it's been updated), I couldn't find any
books on it in the bookstores. I ordered one from Blaise Pascal
Magazine in Europe. It is also very intimidating, as I hardly know
where to start learning something so big. I ultimately do want to
learn, at least at a cursory level, what's in the run time library and
the free component library, since, it seems that most any common task
probably already has modules in there to handle it. Anyway, I don't
know if anyone else has used the system or is interested in it, but I
just thought I'd pass this along.
http://www.freepascal.org/ - compiler
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/ - GUI IDE
http://www.blaisepascal.eu/ - Blaise Pascal Magazine
If anyone has experience with this or Delphi please touch base with me.
I'd like to find other contacts with knowledge on the subject.
Sincerely,
Ron
--
(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone. I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such. I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)
Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com
_______________________________________________
tech-chat mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.linuxmoose.com/mailman/listinfo/tech-chat
