I loved Pascal instantly because my first language was mainframe APL, followed by some weird in-house macroassembler that Xerox was using on its 8080-based business boxes. Compared to APL, Pascal is not only elegant but transcendent. Verbosity bothers me not at all (I used to write COBOL too) because I like being able to read and understand what I've written six months after I set it aside. You couldn't do that with APL, and I had a lot of trouble doing it with C.
As a few other people here mentioned, I'm creating a FreePascal edition of my ancient Turbo Pascal book, ripping out stuff that nobody needs anymore, like CGA graphics and TurboVision. (I believe that there's a Turbo Vision clone available for FreePascal, but I just can't force myself to learn it again and write about it, even though I was writing paying apps with it in 1993.) The book is free, and the current version (I tinker with it irregularly) can be found here:
I'm going to stop building the release date into the filename with the next release; just search for "FreePascal SquareOne.pdf".
I'm programming almost exclusively in Lazarus these days, a lot of it for the Raspberry Pi. At some point I'd like to write a couple of shortish books on specific Lazarus topics like databases, and once we get settled in Phoenix I'll give it a try.
BTW, my friend erbo told me about this thread, so I figured I'd stop in and say hi.
> I'm creating a FreePascal edition of my ancient Turbo Pascal book
Getting my hands on an early edition (first or second, I'm not not quite sure) of Complete Turbo Pascal in my teens is a big party of why I ended up as a programmer.
I'm glad to see its still alive, and hopefully still inspiring new programmers.
It's about due, but until the publisher decides to update it, I don't get to update it. There are length issues: I'd like to spend another 100 pages covering 64-bit issues, but there's a hard limit of 600 pages on the book. I'd have to cut something else out, and that's a hard decision. When I get the call, I will definitely do an update, but when that happens, again, is not up to me.
As a few other people here mentioned, I'm creating a FreePascal edition of my ancient Turbo Pascal book, ripping out stuff that nobody needs anymore, like CGA graphics and TurboVision. (I believe that there's a Turbo Vision clone available for FreePascal, but I just can't force myself to learn it again and write about it, even though I was writing paying apps with it in 1993.) The book is free, and the current version (I tinker with it irregularly) can be found here:
http://www.copperwood.com/pub/FreePascalSquareOne--08-06-201...
I'm going to stop building the release date into the filename with the next release; just search for "FreePascal SquareOne.pdf".
I'm programming almost exclusively in Lazarus these days, a lot of it for the Raspberry Pi. At some point I'd like to write a couple of shortish books on specific Lazarus topics like databases, and once we get settled in Phoenix I'll give it a try.
BTW, my friend erbo told me about this thread, so I figured I'd stop in and say hi.
--73--
Jeff Duntemann K7JPD