Re: [ Slightly Off Topic ] Background & Why I love Lazarus & Pascal

[Peter Williams <pewslinuxvault gmail com>]

G'day Robert,
(and all CC folks)

See my comments below (I'll try to not top post).

Fond Regards and Best Wishes,
    PEW { Peter Eric Williams }
from Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

My free websites:
http://pewink.org  (&)
http://pewslinuxvault.googlepages.com

----

On 12 March 2010 03:32, Robert Bradbury <robert bradbury gmail com> wrote:
>
> Peter,
>
> Interesting note (though it may not have been of interest in general to the
> gnome-games community); but your story was of interest to me.

You will see on my website ( http://pewink.org then go to the Delphi
source code page) that I have written a number of games in Delphi.
Also some utilities are there also.

I have converted some of these (smaller ones) to Lazarus, but not yet
released the code to the FOSS community. That's on my to-do list. :-)
When I do, I'll make them available on my
http://pewslinuxvault.googlepage.com website -- with links from the
older Delphi versions to the newer Lazarus ones.

That's the plan, anyway. Does anyone want to volunteer to help me
collaborate on converting some of the old Delphi 5/7 projects over to
Lazarus? Lazarus already has a built-in Delphi to Lazarus conversion
tool, which I think is pretty powerful.

Also, if there is someone reading this who would like to help me...
Please also have a look a my 'Downloads' page of my http://pewink.org
website. It contains software which I developed in Delphi 5 and 7 and
did not release the source for. I am willing to also make these FOSS.

Many of them are very big and complicated. ;-) Others not so big. I
started by trying to make them shareware but quickly decided that it
would be easier for me to make them freeware. I've still got the code
for them on cd-r & they're coded in Delphi.

Games
----------
* Hexxpawn8 Game
* Adventure Game Utility 3-in-1 package (3 apps which also share some
common code) for developing small adventure games

Utilities
-----------
* Find-a-Word Puzzle generator
* Simple Character Map program
* and a text editor which multiple forms.
My intention was / is to convert may of them to Lazarus --- time
permitting and also permitting that I can find Lazarus versions of the
components I use. Or perhaps, where I've used third party components,
try to port them.

>
> I to have a fondness for my first language which was PPL (polymorphic
> programming language).

Never heard of it, sorry. ;-)))  As I mentioned, I studied many
programming languages. At TAFE, Uni of C and many other places. ;-)
Pascal was probably my favourite one.

>I don't think it made it out of Harvard and a couple
> of other universities but it was what was taught to people learning a
> programming language their first year at Harvard in the mid-late 1970s.  It
> had line numbers (like basic), no strong typing (I think it may have
> auto-converted types), was interpreted (one of my TA's was a grad student
> writing the first compiler), but had more advanced features like functions,
> recursion and operator redefinition and overloading (so one could for
> example define complex math operations).  An interesting language for
> newbies with an interesting mix of simplicity and complexity.
>

Yes, Commodore (C=) Basic 4 which the old C= PET 4016/32 used wasn't
strongly typed either. Actually the if..(condition)..then..(statement)
in C= basic 4 didn't even have an ELSE statement. So, you needed to
use GOTOs and line numbers to implement ; in effect the ELSE
behaviour.

C= Basic 7 for the C= 128 was quite a big improvement. I have also
owned and programmed the C= 64 and C=128.

I've also played around with a language for the C= PET, 64, 128 and
other models, called COMAL 80. It was sort of a cross between basic
and pascal. Very similar to later strongly typed version of basic. I
believe that COMAL is still around in different versions.

> But it is your background in 2D and 3D design which is of greatest interest
> to me.  I generally use the Gentoo variant of Linux because it allows one to
> put together ones own "ebuild" (packages) and they tend to follow the
> cutting edge of package evolution (rather than a more "freeze & release"
> oriented approach common with other variants of Linux).

I use, as I think I mentioned, both Mint 8 Free & Mandriva 2010.0
Free. For my HP Laptop and Desktop respectively.

I like both versions. But Mandriva 2010 seems to be more complicated,
than Mint 8 Free.

I'm still trying to work out how I can use my ROOT user's theme files
on this computer (Mandriva), with the 'Peter' (non-admin) user on the
same computer. I have created three (3) customized themes as ROOT, and
saved them as the ROOT user.

I used the 'locate' command from a Terminal and found the ROOT user's
themes have been saved as hidden /.theme.myfilename files. And I want
to share them with the 'Peter' user (ordinary user, non-admin rights)
on the same computer.

Do you know how I can do this? Also, I'm having problems with working
out how I can save these Theme files, as quite often the SAVE button
is greyed out (disabled).

>
> A problem arises when packages depend on "older" environments and the
> environments move ahead but packages lag behind.

Yes, well, I think that the Lazarus developers are *trying* to be
proactive and support as many new environment as possible. Also, it is
multi-platform; and I can only imagine that that must make it more
difficult to develop. ;-(

>I gather that Lazarus is a
> pascal development environment which seems similar to what Qt is for C++.

Actually, it's based on Delphi, which is basically Object Oriented
Pascal. It also relies on Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) which Lazarus
need to compile. You could say the FPC and Lazarus have a synergistic
relationship. ;-)))

> At the current time Gentoo is transiting from Qt3 to Qt4.  This will result
> in the leaving behind the Qt3 based 2D CAD system (sci-misc/qcad) which is
> quite interesting for me [1].  Qcad is about to become an "unsupported"
> package due to the development environment transition.

I must confess that I'm quite ignorant about the different desktop
environments. *SMILE* I use Gnome, and I don't particularly care much
for KDE. I know that there are other options and etc which I probably
have not configured, yet. :-)

> Now, the developers
> of Qcad, whom appear to be a quasi-commercial organization in Germany seem
> to suggest that Qcad may be upgraded, hopefully to a Qt4 based version, in
> 2010, but given that Qcad for Linux seems to be a "limited" version I was
> wondering if you are aware of any complete, "open source" 2D/3D CAD packages
> which are available under Linux?

I'm pretty sure that I've seen some CAD packages available when I was
experimenting with different software in Mint 7 and this desktop (a
year or two back). I went a little crazy - installing everything that
looked good :) with the result that my system became unstable. I
needed to reinstall and lost a lot of it's configuration info :-(
That's just Life!

>
> Regards,
> Robert Bradbury
>
> 1. Part of my interest in qcad is a subset of it in Gentoo known as
> "qcad-parts" which I suspect is a collection of pre-designed parts that
> might be used in qcad.  My interest in those is whether or not software
> could be designed, which might take advantage of Nanorex's Nanoengineer-1
> software (which is open source) which might convert the macro-scale qcad
> parts, to nanoscale "molecular parts", e.g. a "solid structural object" from
> a macroscale design could be converted into one or more carbon nanotubes or
> other atomic scale objects which could then be modeled from a molecular
> dynamics standpoint to determine its properties.
>

Sorry, I don't know anything about nanoscale and atomic scale objects. ;-)

Maybe someone on this CC list will be able to help you. I think that
many CAD packages have library for the different branches of science.
I cannot comment I with ones have what, and are FOSS.

Cheers
      Peter W (aka pew)
from Hobart, Australia  ;))))
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