Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Dufr]

Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?

My worry about Ada is that it will entail too much overhead in terms of learning, because of the strict rules, whereas programming in Object Pascal is said to be easier. Or, at least, this is what I have heard.
Is my understanding correct?

Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again, remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?

Thanks

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Nasser M. Abbasi]

On 7/4/2013 1:59 AM, Dufr wrote:
> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
>
> My worry about Ada is that it will entail too much overhead in terms of learning,
>because of the strict rules, whereas programming in Object Pascal is said to be easier.
>Or, at least, this is what I have heard.
> Is my understanding correct?
>
> Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again,
>remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?
>
> Thanks
>

Object Pascal still around? I thought it is gone.

Or do you mean Delphi? but I thought that is gone also, Borland sold
all its Pascal stuff. Googling around shows that it is now called
Embarcadero Delphi.

Or do you mean Free Pascal? Is that OO also?

I myself liked Turbo Pascal very much in the good old days, was fun
programming in it.

--Nasser

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[gautier_niouzes]

Le jeudi 4 juillet 2013 08:59:26 UTC+2, Dufr a écrit :
> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?

Pascal is easier for learning the basics of programming and for setting up small test programs.
The issue is when, even as a hobbyist, your projects become more ambitious. At some point you need to mix various components, or change platform, or work on several systems.
Sooner or later you face the fragmentation of the Pascal language, which is not a problem if you stay forever with one Pascal dialect.

Some thought about this topic here: http://p2ada.sf.net/pascada.htm

_________________________ 
Gautier's Ada programming 
http://gautiersblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Ada 
NB: follow the above link for a valid e-mail address

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[john]

> Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again, remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?

I'm a hobbyist and currently use Ada for one of my projects. Anyway, there is no general answer to your question, because it depends on what you want to program. 

If you want to write proprietary GUI applications, FreePascal/Lazarus seems to be the a good choice.

If you're looking for long-term maintainability, want to be able to compile and understand your program in ten years from now, Ada will be better.

In terms of learning, I'd say that Ada and FreePascal are on a par. Ada has a few initial hurdles - it took me quite a while to understand how generics work and tasking is more complicated than in other languages because it is properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads. Overall, my experience is that Ada is easy to learn, especially since you will in practise only use a few of its features most of the time. However, Pascal dialects are also easy to learn, as I remember from TurboPascal a long long time ago. 

To summarize, your question is impossible to answer without more details on what kind of programs you intend to write. Of course, it'll hard to get unbiased answers to these kind of questions on an Ada newsgroup, you should perhaps consider asking this at a general programming forum.

P.S. One big advantage of Ada over any other language I've tried (and I've tried many) is that it tends to catch errors during compilation - it takes longer to get a program to compile, but once it compiles it usually works. I spend almost no time on debugging.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[AdaMagica]

On Thursday, July 4, 2013 1:48:21 PM UTC+2, jo...@peppermind.com wrote:
> In terms of learning, I'd say that Ada and FreePascal are on a par.
> Ada has a few initial hurdles - it took me quite a while to understand how
> generics work and tasking is more complicated than in other languages because
> it is properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads.

I second all this, but the last argument is odd. Something well-defined is more complicated than something not so well-defined?

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[john]

> tasking is more complicated than in other languages because
> 
> > it is properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads.
> 
> 
> 
> I second all this, but the last argument is odd. Something well-defined is more > complicated than something not so well-defined?

Isn't that often the case? I didn't want to imply that there is anything wrong with Ada tasking. To paraphrase Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” 

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On Thu, 4 Jul 2013 07:22:52 -0700 (PDT), john@peppermind.com wrote:

>> tasking is more complicated than in other languages because
>> 
>>> it is properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads.
>> 
>> I second all this, but the last argument is odd. Something well-defined is
>> more > complicated than something not so well-defined?
> 
> Isn't that often the case? I didn't want to imply that there is anything
> wrong with Ada tasking. To paraphrase Einstein: "Everything should be made
> as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

This discussion reads strange to me. How can anybody seriously claim that
beginthread, fork, CreateMutex, WaitForSingleObject, compartments etc stuff
is simpler than Ada's tasking. Is it a joke?

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Bill Findlay]

On 04/07/2013 07:59, in article
b478db8c-2eda-43fc-a3b3-aeca2a634bf2@googlegroups.com, "Dufr"
<dufriz@gmail.com> wrote:

> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
> 
> My worry about Ada is that it will entail too much overhead in terms of
> learning, because of the strict rules, whereas programming in Object Pascal is
> said to be easier. Or, at least, this is what I have heard.
> Is my understanding correct?
> 
> Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again,
> remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?

Yes. Ada is a vastly better and more capable language, and because of that
it is easier to learn and use than Pascal, not the reverse. (Strict rules
are good for you, by the way; Pascal has strict rules too.)

This opinion is founded on many years of teaching both to beginners.

-- 
Bill Findlay
with blueyonder.co.uk;
use  surname & forename;

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Bill Findlay]

On 04/07/2013 12:47, in article
5accdd81-aebd-476f-83d1-fe52895d5220@googlegroups.com,
"gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com" <gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Le jeudi 4 juillet 2013 08:59:26 UTC+2, Dufr a écrit :
>> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
> 
> Pascal is easier for learning the basics of programming and for setting up
> small test programs.

My experience of teaching both contradicts that claim.

-- 
Bill Findlay
with blueyonder.co.uk;
use  surname & forename;

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Lucretia]

On Thursday, 4 July 2013 07:59:26 UTC+1, Dufr  wrote:
> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
> 
> My worry about Ada is that it will entail too much overhead in terms of learning, because of the strict rules, whereas programming in Object Pascal is said to be easier. Or, at least, this is what I have heard.
> 
> Is my understanding correct?
> 
> Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again, remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?

Here's how I see things...

1) Pascal was developed as a learning language, like BASIC. Once you get to grips with both Pascal and BASIC you have nowhere else to go to create more advanced programs without going with a non-standard dialect which won't work with any other compilers, if you need to.

2) Both Pascal and BASIC are dead.

Going back to 1, yeah there's FreePascal/Lazarus which implements Delphi, but even Borland doesn't support Delphi anymore and like I said, it's a non-standard implementation. Standards are worth something.

I would say that Ada could easily take the place as a learning language like Pascal, the difference being, you have somewhere to go when you want more complex applications.

Is Ada more complex than Pascal, in some ways yes it is, but not by much. Pascal doesn't have generics for a start and you will start to learn those quite quickly with Ada; same for separate compilation.

Give Ada a go, you won't regret it, apart from compiler bugs (or Internal Compiler Errors - ICE's). Download GNAT and start messing about with Ada 2012.

Luke.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Jeffrey Carter]

On 07/03/2013 11:59 PM, Dufr wrote:
> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
>
> My worry about Ada is that it will entail too much overhead in terms of learning, because of the strict rules, whereas programming in Object Pascal is said to be easier. Or, at least, this is what I have heard.
> Is my understanding correct?
>
> Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again, remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?

In a controlled experiment, the US Military Academy (West Point) found that Ada 
(95) was a better language for their 1st programming class than Pascal:

http://www.sigada.org/conf/sa98/papers/murtagh.pdf

Ada was based originally on Pascal, and corrected a number of deficiencies in 
the language. For example, semicolon errors, fairly common in Pascal, where the 
semicolon is a statement separator, are practically nonexistent in Ada, where 
the semicolon is a statement terminator.

If you want to utilize more than one core at a time, you'll find Ada's 
high-level tasking concepts easier to understand and far less error prone than a 
low-level library, or even the threading concepts of Java.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however
admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English
mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility
in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will
pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes,
he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."
Charles Babbage
92

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Niklas Holsti]

On 13-07-04 17:31 , Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Jul 2013 07:22:52 -0700 (PDT), john@peppermind.com wrote:
> 
>>> tasking is more complicated than in other languages because
>>>
>>>> it is properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads.
>>>
>>> I second all this, but the last argument is odd. Something well-defined is
>>> more > complicated than something not so well-defined?
>>
>> Isn't that often the case? I didn't want to imply that there is anything
>> wrong with Ada tasking. To paraphrase Einstein: "Everything should be made
>> as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
> 
> This discussion reads strange to me. How can anybody seriously claim that
> beginthread, fork, CreateMutex, WaitForSingleObject, compartments etc stuff
> is simpler than Ada's tasking. Is it a joke?

Complex functionality that is presented as a library with an API often
*looks* simple, because the API documentation seldom bothers to explain
all the concepts, constraints, and pitfalls, so it looks like there is a
ready solution (= a function call) for every need. This means that you
can start coding something quickly, and only discover the problems
later. In contrast, if you try to learn Ada tasking from the Ada RM,
there is a lot of text, with some complex ideas and issues, plus the
flexible syntax that you have master well enough to select the forms you
need. Better in the end, of course.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
      .      @       .

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[john]

On Thursday, July 4, 2013 3:31:40 PM UTC+1, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> >> tasking is more complicated than in other languages because
> 
> >> 
> 
> >>> it is properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads.
> 
> >> 
> 
> >> I second all this, but the last argument is odd. Something well-defined is
> 
> >> more > complicated than something not so well-defined?
> 
> > 
> 
> > Isn't that often the case? I didn't want to imply that there is anything
> 
> > wrong with Ada tasking. To paraphrase Einstein: "Everything should be made
> 
> > as simple as possible, but no simpler."
> 
> 
> 
> This discussion reads strange to me. How can anybody seriously claim that
> 
> beginthread, fork, CreateMutex, WaitForSingleObject, compartments etc stuff
> 
> is simpler than Ada's tasking. Is it a joke?
> 
 
No, but we might have different perspectives. I've just learned Ada. In comparison with FreePascal you're right about parallelism constructs, though. I've checked on their web pages and it looks fairly complicated. I had other languages in mind, where it's often easy to write parallel code but hard to make it correct.  For example in Racket, (thread <thunk>) will execute the parameterless function <thunk> concurrently. Or, take OpenMP on top of C++ where you can use pragmas like #pragma omp parallel for automatically parallelizing loops.

For me as an Ada newbie learning tasks and protected objects was easy - but understanding Rendezvous was hard. Having Barnes's book and McCormick et. al. helped, but generally I'd say the Ada references focus on completeness and correctness rather than being beginner-friendly.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[J-P. Rosen]

Le 04/07/2013 20:18, Niklas Holsti a écrit :
> [...] if you try to learn Ada tasking from the Ada RM [...]
Don't try to learn Ada from the RM, and especially tasking! There are
plenty of good books and tutorials nowadays.

BTW: can you name any language where people would learn it from the
standard?

-- 
J-P. Rosen
Adalog
2 rue du Docteur Lombard, 92441 Issy-les-Moulineaux CEDEX
Tel: +33 1 45 29 21 52, Fax: +33 1 45 29 25 00
http://www.adalog.fr

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Jeffrey Carter]

On 07/04/2013 12:04 PM, J-P. Rosen wrote:
>
> BTW: can you name any language where people would learn it from the
> standard?

Ada 83?

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however
admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English
mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility
in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will
pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes,
he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."
Charles Babbage
92

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Shark8]

On Thursday, July 4, 2013 2:24:24 PM UTC-6, Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> On 07/04/2013 12:04 PM, J-P. Rosen wrote:
> >
> > BTW: can you name any language where people would learn it from the
> > standard?
> 
> Ada 83?

Oberon-2, perhaps. -- It has only 33 productions for its syntax:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon-2#Syntax

LISP 1.5 -- http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Robert A Duff]

Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> writes:

> On 07/04/2013 12:04 PM, J-P. Rosen wrote:
>>
>> BTW: can you name any language where people would learn it from the
>> standard?
>
> Ada 83?

I was about to say the same thing -- you beat me to it!

- Bob

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Robert A Duff]

Dufr <dufriz@gmail.com> writes:

> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?

Ada, for all sorts of reasons.  Better module system, better type
system, better syntax, full-coverage rules for case statements and
aggregates, etc.  Also, non-technical reasons:  better availability of
compilers, more active user community, uniformity across platforms.

All that goes for hobbyists and professionals.

> My worry about Ada is that it will entail too much overhead in terms
> of learning, because of the strict rules, whereas programming in
> Object Pascal is said to be easier. Or, at least, this is what I have
> heard.  Is my understanding correct?

Strict rules do not make a programming language hard to learn.  Just the
opposite, in fact.  If you don't know the rules, the compiler tells you,
and you learn as you go along.  That can be frustrating, but for me it's
a lot less frustrating than debugging!

It is true that learning all of Ada is much harder than learning all of
Object Pascal.  But that's OK -- you don't have to learn all of Ada to
do useful stuff, and you certainly don't have to learn it all at once.
Ignore tasking unless you want to do concurrency, and even then ignore
rendezvous.  Learn how to raise exceptions, but not how to handle them.
Ignore all of the Annexes, except for parts of Annex A.  Ignore chapter 13.

And as others have said, learn it from a textbook or on-line tutorial.
Don't approach the Ada Reference Manual until you know Ada.
(One exception: for the predefined libraries, Annex A of the Ada RM
is fairly readable.)

- Bob

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Jeffrey Carter]

On 07/05/2013 02:20 PM, Robert A Duff wrote:
> Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> writes:
>
>> Ada 83?
>
> I was about to say the same thing -- you beat me to it!

Great minds think alike.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it
while the first legion marched across. If programmers today
worked under similar ground rules, they might well find
themselves getting much more interested in Ada!"
Robert Dewar
62

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Dufr]

The reasons you guys gave in favor of Ada are all pretty solid, no doubt. And yet, I am not fully convinced yet, because:

a hobbiyst learner needs a lot of support, and from what I have seen Object Pascal (in the form of Free Pascal) has a much larger community of enthusiasts than Ada, with a very active forum.
The Ada community consists mostly in highly-qualified professionals (engineers, scientists, etc), whose contributions are very valuable, BUT perhaps not so useful for a hobbyist.
By simply comparing this Ada Google Group with Free Pascal / Lazarus forums, one can quickly see that, apart from being much more active, the Free Pascal 
forum has myriads of posts of a very practical nature (tons of code snippets, problems and solutions, etc). In short, one really gets one's hands dirty quick with the Free Pascal's forum.
By contrast, the posts on this Google Group are, one the whole, much more technical and abstract. This is not to find fault with them, of course.

I am just wondering whether Ada, which is no doubt a superior language from the technical point of view, is really for me - considering all the practical hurdles that a learner has to face, vis-a-vis the fact that the expectation of receiving practical support from the Ada community *seems* more limited than with Object Pascal.
I hope no one gets offended by this post.
Feel free to criticize and debunk my assumptions.

Cheers

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Georg Bauhaus]

On 06.07.13 09:04, Dufr wrote:
> The reasons you guys gave in favor of Ada are all pretty solid, no doubt. And yet, I am not fully convinced yet, because:
>
> a hobbiyst learner needs a lot of support, and from what I have seen Object Pascal (in the form of Free Pascal) has a much larger community of enthusiasts than Ada, with a very active forum.

When a large, active community went gold panning, those who reliably
made profit were those who owned the hotels, or sold rubber boots.

> By simply comparing this Ada Google Group

This is not a Google Group. Google just displays this group, which
is comp.lang.ada, as if it was a Google Group. It isn't. This group
is independent of Google, both technically and conceptually.

> I am just wondering whether Ada, which is no doubt a superior language from the technical point of view, is really for me - considering all the practical hurdles that a learner has to face, vis-a-vis the fact that the expectation of receiving practical support from the Ada community *seems* more limited than with Object Pascal.

In a pinch, and not just then, Rosetta Code has many practical examples
for Ada. GNAT has high quality examples right in its distribution,
John English's online book, "The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming",
is just one of many excellent resources for learning the language.
Do the exercises.

If you have questions while studying any of your choice, or a good book,
ask, here, or at StackExchange.

Do you have any more specific questions not covered in the resources?

To get started, see if you can work through the first two chapters
of a resource; be a little patient and start over as necessary.
Install GNAT, and be sure to read the introductory material about
GNAT and Ada in the GNAT User's Guide. It's worth it, even if you
decide you should do something else, first.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Jeffrey Carter]

On 07/06/2013 12:04 AM, Dufr wrote:
>
> a hobbiyst learner needs a lot of support, and from what I have seen Object Pascal (in the form of Free Pascal) has a much larger community of enthusiasts than Ada, with a very active forum.
> The Ada community consists mostly in highly-qualified professionals (engineers, scientists, etc), whose contributions are very valuable, BUT perhaps not so useful for a hobbyist.
> By simply comparing this Ada Google Group with Free Pascal / Lazarus forums, one can quickly see that, apart from being much more active, the Free Pascal
> forum has myriads of posts of a very practical nature (tons of code snippets, problems and solutions, etc). In short, one really gets one's hands dirty quick with the Free Pascal's forum.
> By contrast, the posts on this Google Group are, one the whole, much more technical and abstract. This is not to find fault with them, of course.

The worse the language, the greater the number of posts it will have giving code 
examples and problems and solutions. A poorly designed language has more 
"gotchas" and inconsistencies, leading to a greater proportion of its users 
encountering difficulties with the language and posting problems encountered, 
and a greater number of posts illustrating useful "tricks" needed to use the 
language successfully.

Ada, being one of the best designed languages, has far fewer such posts. One can 
use the posts about problems encountered that recur frequently to identify 
features that should not be in the language and should be avoided. They mostly 
concern anonymous access types and programming by extension.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Every sperm is sacred."
Monty Python's the Meaning of Life
55

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Ludovic Brenta]

Dufr <dufriz@gmail.com> writes:
> The reasons you guys gave in favor of Ada are all pretty solid, no
> doubt. And yet, I am not fully convinced yet, because:
>
> a hobbiyst learner needs a lot of support, and from what I have seen
> Object Pascal (in the form of Free Pascal) has a much larger community
> of enthusiasts than Ada, with a very active forum.  The Ada community
> consists mostly in highly-qualified professionals (engineers,
> scientists, etc), whose contributions are very valuable, BUT perhaps
> not so useful for a hobbyist.

Are you implying that advice from an amateur hobbyist is more useful
than advice from a seasoned professional? :) Also note that almost
everyone here on comp.lang.ada is, technically, a "hobbyist" -- very few
of us have the luxury of being here in a professional capacity.

Just try asking beginner questions and you'll see your assumptions
debunked and you'll be quickly reassured.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Shark8]

On Saturday, July 6, 2013 11:41:32 AM UTC-6, Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> On 07/06/2013 12:04 AM, Dufr wrote:
> 
> The worse the language, the greater the number of posts it will have giving code 
> examples and problems and solutions. A poorly designed language has more 
> "gotchas" and inconsistencies, leading to a greater proportion of its users 
> encountering difficulties with the language and posting problems encountered, 
> and a greater number of posts illustrating useful "tricks" needed to use the 
> language successfully.


I agree -- this is why PHP is so popular in web-searches (e.g. the TIOBE Index), because the language is FULL of gotchas and inconsistencies and poor design. Like this: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=29992 -- note how the duplicating of the penultimate element is considered NOT A BUG!

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Maurizio Tomasi]

On Saturday, July 6, 2013 9:04:12 AM UTC+2, Dufr wrote:
> I am just wondering whether Ada, which is no doubt a superior language from the technical point of view, is really for me - considering all the practical hurdles that a learner has to face, vis-a-vis the fact that the expectation of receiving practical support from the Ada community *seems* more limited than with Object Pascal.

My advice is to try code something not too complex using one language and then another: this is the best way to compare them and decide which one best suits your needs. If you do not know what kind of program to write, you can get some inspiration from Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) or Programming Praxis (http://programmingpraxis.com/).

Maurizio.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Patrick]

I just want to mention that you don't have to learn all of Ada in order to use it. The Ada 95 subset may be more then enough

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Mike H]

In message <edcc9529-9687-4814-912a-34246bf51bd6@googlegroups.com>, 
Maurizio Tomasi <ziotom78@gmail.com> writes
>My advice is to try code something not too complex using one language 
>and then another: this is the best way to compare them and decide which 
>one best suits your needs. If you do not know what kind of program to 
>write, you can get some inspiration from Project Euler 
>(http://projecteuler.net/) or Programming Praxis 
>(http://programmingpraxis.com/).
>
Read an 81 alphanumeric character string.
Is it made up of digits in range 1..9 and no other?
If so, then consider the 81 digits as being a 9x9 array and check 
whether that array forms a correct Sudoku solution.

-- 
Mike Hopkins
"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" =
"I am human, (so) I (should) judge nothing of humanity to be strange."
Publius Terentius (195/185–159 BC)

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Marc C]

On Saturday, July 6, 2013 2:04:12 AM UTC-5, Dufr wrote:

> I am just wondering whether Ada, which is no doubt a superior language from the technical point of view, is really for me - considering all the practical hurdles that a learner has to face, vis-a-vis the fact that the expectation of receiving practical support from the Ada community *seems* more limited than with Object Pascal.

A couple other good resources for Ada info and support:

The Ada sub-reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/ada

Stack Overflow (Ada tagged): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ada

Marc A. Criley
Ada sub-reddit moderator

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Thu, 04 Jul 2013 08:59:26 +0200, Dufr <dufriz@gmail.com> a écrit:

> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
>
> My worry about Ada is that it will entail too much overhead in terms of  
> learning, because of the strict rules, whereas programming in Object  
> Pascal is said to be easier. Or, at least, this is what I have heard.
> Is my understanding correct?
>
> Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal  
> (again, remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?
>
> Thanks

ObjectPascal seems to be vendor specific [1], while Ada is an ISO  
standard. That may or may not matter, it's up to you to see.

[1]: I could only find references to vendors on the English Wikipedia page  
for ObjectPascal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal
> The open source GNU Pascal compiler is available as a
> front-end to the GNU compiler collection, which implements
> the ISO 7185 Pascal standard, and "most" of the ISO 10206
> Extended Pascal standard.
Not clear if this ISO 10206 Extended Pascal is Object Pascal or not.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Thu, 04 Jul 2013 13:47:20 +0200, <gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com> a écrit:

> Le jeudi 4 juillet 2013 08:59:26 UTC+2, Dufr a écrit :
>> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
>
> Pascal is easier for learning the basics of programming and for setting  
> up small test programs.
> The issue is when, even as a hobbyist, your projects become more  
> ambitious. At some point you need to mix various components, or change  
> platform, or work on several systems.
> Sooner or later you face the fragmentation of the Pascal language, which  
> is not a problem if you stay forever with one Pascal dialect.

I don't agree with the first sentence. A well choose Ada subset is as much  
easy to introduce as Pascal may be. I would say even more, as Pascal's  
behaviour vary too much from compiler to compiler, to not become an issue.  
Introducing a standard presents an advantage here.

What's worth learning something which will become false or subtly  
different, depending on the vendors and platforms? That's not pedagogic.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Thu, 04 Jul 2013 20:18:09 +0200, Niklas Holsti  
<niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> a écrit:
> Complex functionality that is presented as a library with an API often
> *looks* simple, because the API documentation seldom bothers to explain
> all the concepts, constraints, and pitfalls, so it looks like there is a
> ready solution (= a function call) for every need. This means that you
> can start coding something quickly, and only discover the problems
> later. In contrast, if you try to learn Ada tasking from the Ada RM,
> there is a lot of text, with some complex ideas and issues, plus the
> flexible syntax that you have master well enough to select the forms you
> need. Better in the end, of course.

I agree with Jean‑Pierre. Don't suggest one to learn Ada from the RM. You  
can do it yourself if you know what you do, but don't recommend the same  
to someone else.

For a non‑beginner (suppose a minimal prior knowledge), a better starting  
point, concise and rather complete except with respect to Ada 2012 is:
http://www.adaic.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Ada-Distilled-24-January-2011-Ada-2005-Version.pdf
Then complete it with the introduction to what Ada 2012 added in:
http://www.adacore.com/uploads/technical-papers/Ada2012_Rational_Introducion.pdf


-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Sat, 06 Jul 2013 09:04:12 +0200, Dufr <dufriz@gmail.com> a écrit:

> The reasons you guys gave in favor of Ada are all pretty solid, no  
> doubt. And yet, I am not fully convinced yet, because:
>
> a hobbiyst learner needs a lot of support, and from what I have seen  
> Object Pascal (in the form of Free Pascal) has a much larger community  
> of enthusiasts than Ada, with a very active forum.

Free Pascal, whose semantic depends on compile time option? Not sure it's  
a good bet… (not to mention the documentation which is not always in sync  
with what the compiler really do).

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2013-08-27, Yannick Duchêne <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Le Sat, 06 Jul 2013 09:04:12 +0200, Dufr <dufriz@gmail.com> a écrit:
>
>> The reasons you guys gave in favor of Ada are all pretty solid, no  
>> doubt. And yet, I am not fully convinced yet, because:
>>
>> a hobbiyst learner needs a lot of support, and from what I have seen  
>> Object Pascal (in the form of Free Pascal) has a much larger community  
>> of enthusiasts than Ada, with a very active forum.
>
> Free Pascal, whose semantic depends on compile time option? Not sure it's  
> a good bet? (not to mention the documentation which is not always in sync  
> with what the compiler really do).
>

The problem is that the good support is more important to some learners
than a technically better language.

I've had a look at the Free Pascal support channels in the past and they
appear to be very friendly (for the most part) and understanding of what
a person wants to achieve.

Here in comp.lang.ada, people tend to be rather standoffish and can come
out with suggestions (for example, embedded hardware platforms) that are
completely out of touch with what hobbyists are wanting to do.

Such attitudes, which seem to be rather common here, can be _very_
off-putting to people who have decided they want to learn a Wirth type
language as part of a hobby but are not sure which one to choose.

In some ways, the Ada community around here can be it's own worse enemy
at times.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Bill Findlay]

On 27/08/2013 17:50, in article kvilcc$89p$1@dont-email.me, "Simon Clubley"
<clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
 
> Here in comp.lang.ada, people tend to be rather standoffish

Not in my experience.  Quite the contrary, in fact.
 
> In some ways, the Ada community around here can be it's own worse enemy
> at times.

"its"

Ada is about getting things right.

-- 
Bill Findlay
with blueyonder.co.uk;
use  surname & forename;

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:50:20 +0200, Simon Clubley  
<clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> a écrit:

> On 2013-08-27, Yannick Duchêne <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:
>> Le Sat, 06 Jul 2013 09:04:12 +0200, Dufr <dufriz@gmail.com> a écrit:
>>
>>> The reasons you guys gave in favor of Ada are all pretty solid, no
>>> doubt. And yet, I am not fully convinced yet, because:
>>>
>>> a hobbiyst learner needs a lot of support, and from what I have seen
>>> Object Pascal (in the form of Free Pascal) has a much larger community
>>> of enthusiasts than Ada, with a very active forum.
>>
>> Free Pascal, whose semantic depends on compile time option? Not sure  
>> it's
>> a good bet? (not to mention the documentation which is not always in  
>> sync
>> with what the compiler really do).
>>
>
> The problem is that the good support is more important to some learners
> than a technically better language.
>
> I've had a look at the Free Pascal support channels in the past and they
> appear to be very friendly (for the most part) and understanding of what
> a person wants to achieve.

On that precise point, my personal experience gave me an opposite feeling.  
I remember I've re‑opened a bug report two times (before I gave up). This  
was something the documentation said, and the compiler did something else,  
and that was on a topic as important as visibility of object methods. I  
opened a bug report saying either the compiler must implement the  
“specification” as stated in the documentation, or the documentation must  
be updated to match what the compiler do. The answer I get was that none  
of the two will be done and the report was closed immediately. As this was  
looking totally silly to me and could not believe it, I reopened it two  
times, with some insistence to repeat either the documentation had to be  
updated or the compiler fixed, and asking if it was really necessary to  
fork FPK (they did not enjoyed this sentence) to get a compiler doing what  
the documentation says, with same result.

Not friendly at all and no understanding neither, and to me, it was not  
serious.

That's precisely this incident (a big one to me at that time), which made  
me seek for another option. I learned about Oberon (the language and the  
OS), Modula (misc variants), and Ada, which I already knew in the past but  
I did not understood at the moment. I finally decided to choose Ada,  
because Oberon and Modula looked dead to me and because of the existence  
of an ISO standard.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Gour]

On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 16:50:20 +0000 (UTC)
Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:


> The problem is that the good support is more important to some
> learners than a technically better language.

I'm in somewhat similar situation and looking onto which language to
focus my learning in order to later write multi-platform GUI app.

However, Ada is, this time, not measured against Pascal but against D.

By looking at the table comparing the two languages
(http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguagesVersusD), it seems to
me they are pretty close without any having some outstanding features
which would be insurmountable.

Level of GUI bindings support is similar in both camps, although there
was some psot recently about the attempt to provide some native GUI lib
in D.

Based on what I can see, development of D is (more) in FOSS-spirit and
it looks that D is more interesting language for open-source projects
with very active mailing lists and choice between 3 compilers (DMD, LDC,
GDC) while Ada seems not to be very popular choice in FOSS world.

Not long ago there was a post in D forums with with subject "Why I chose
D over Ada and Eiffel",
(http://forum.dlang.org/thread/vqsnloitqvouoahdngzb@forum.dlang.org), so
I'm interested what would be reply here on the topic?


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
As the ignorant perform their duties with attachment to results, 
the learned may similarly act, but without attachment, for the 
sake of leading people on the right path.

http://www.atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 23:08:16 +0200, Gour <gour@atmarama.net> a écrit:

> On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 16:50:20 +0000 (UTC)
> Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>
>
>> The problem is that the good support is more important to some
>> learners than a technically better language.
>
> I'm in somewhat similar situation and looking onto which language to
> focus my learning in order to later write multi-platform GUI app.
>
> However, Ada is, this time, not measured against Pascal but against D.
>
> By looking at the table comparing the two languages
> (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguagesVersusD), it seems to
> me they are pretty close without any having some outstanding features
> which would be insurmountable.
>
> Level of GUI bindings support is similar in both camps, although there
> was some psot recently about the attempt to provide some native GUI lib
> in D.

If I may say, don't focus too much on GUI as you know it nowadays and  
since a few decades, as this time may be more and more gone in the future.  
I'm currently working (not full time, but I expect it in the future) on an  
application with which the UI will be entirely in a browser, the  
application being interfaced with the outside world as an HTTP and  
WebSocket server. I've discovered two days ago, a CVS/SCM named Fossil,  
whose UI is made the same way, and which works also as a CGI you can  
install nearly as a drop‑in in any web‑server, and provides the exact same  
UI from a web server as it do when you run it from your desktop (an UI  
which opens in a web‑browser). Mac, Ubuntu, Windows, all three are going  
toward the web‑page style of UI (especially Windows and its Metro UI,  
Ubuntu is going toward web integration into the desktop) in some or other  
ways, more or less visibly (not a lot visible with Ubunt, but it's there  
here as well).

Designing an UI as creating a document structure, giving a style and  
adding user gesture handlers, is easier than creating an UI all by  
programming using a GUI API. Even in the age of multimedia and images  
every where, an UI, is still mainly text and text layout; icons and misc  
graphics does not help that much (or even make it worse) and can't replace  
carefully crafted text layout (font family, size, weight, colour, style,  
decoration, indent, justification, and so on, gives more expressive  
capabilities to an UI than any icon set or 3D‑look‑like buttons).

I may be biased, as I more see an UI as a presentation more than a program  
(to me, the program is what's behind the UI, and the UI presents it to the  
user), but that was to tell a bit (I may be wrong, but I believe I'm not  
wrong).

That's why I'm not afraid of Ada lacking a standard GUI library. Anyway,  
no GUI libraries could gain wide acceptance. The option of an Ada GUI  
comes back here from time to time, and the replies prove there is no hope  
for a GUI library which could please at least 10% of people (more likely  
there would be 10 different API, one for each of these 10%).

> Based on what I can see, development of D is (more) in FOSS-spirit and
> it looks that D is more interesting language for open-source projects
> with very active mailing lists and choice between 3 compilers (DMD, LDC,
> GDC) while Ada seems not to be very popular choice in FOSS world.
>
> Not long ago there was a post in D forums with with subject "Why I chose
> D over Ada and Eiffel",
> (http://forum.dlang.org/thread/vqsnloitqvouoahdngzb@forum.dlang.org), so
> I'm interested what would be reply here on the topic?
>

Seems he had issue with array resizing? So seems he never learned about  
Ada standard containers library or did not see he had all freedom to  
create the opaque data type he needed. An opaque data type for resizable  
array, is not a big issue with Ada, and that's even a common learning  
example.

That said, thanks for mentioning D, as I did not suspect it was still  
there. Will read about it a future day, out of curiosity, as it seems to  
support design by contract and type constraints as Ada do. I just surely  
won't switch to it, as I don't believe any legacy kind of language can go  
a lot more above with safety than Ada already do, if not with the help of  
formal methods, and formal methods are another area (SPARK, Isabelle/HOL  
and so on) and are rather target language neutral.

For the last words: you mentioned FOSS, saying the FOSS world does not  
like Ada. Well, I don't feel the FOSS world enjoy D a lot more, as I've  
never seen the FOSS mention D until today. Just would like to say  
confusing technique and politic is not good. Either you make a choice with  
technical argument or with political intention, but not both, as the  
latter will near to always want to shadow the former (I know it from  
experience, too much). Also keep in mind there is a GPL GNAT, and that if  
many commercial applications choose Ada, this does not prevent to choose  
it for home or freeware or FOSS applications.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 23:08:16 +0200, Gour <gour@atmarama.net> a écrit:
> Not long ago there was a post in D forums with with subject "Why I chose
> D over Ada and Eiffel",
> (http://forum.dlang.org/thread/vqsnloitqvouoahdngzb@forum.dlang.org), so
> I'm interested what would be reply here on the topic?

[next to my previous post] Also at the end, he mentioned easy binding to  
C. Ada too, but he missed it. He also said at the end he is missing a bit  
multiple inheritance: may be he missed multiple inheritance is there with  
Ada, which allows a type to implement multiple interfaces, like in `type T  
is new Interface_A and Interface_B and […] with private;`.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Oliver Kleinke]

Am Tue, 27 Aug 2013 16:34:34 +0200
schrieb Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>:

> Le Thu, 04 Jul 2013 13:47:20 +0200, <gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com> a
> écrit:
> 
> > Le jeudi 4 juillet 2013 08:59:26 UTC+2, Dufr a écrit :
> >> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
> >
> > Pascal is easier for learning the basics of programming and for
> > setting up small test programs.
> > The issue is when, even as a hobbyist, your projects become more  
> > ambitious. At some point you need to mix various components, or
> > change platform, or work on several systems.
> > Sooner or later you face the fragmentation of the Pascal language,
> > which is not a problem if you stay forever with one Pascal dialect.
> 
> I don't agree with the first sentence. A well choose Ada subset is as
> much easy to introduce as Pascal may be. I would say even more, as
> Pascal's behaviour vary too much from compiler to compiler, to not
> become an issue. Introducing a standard presents an advantage here.
> 
> What's worth learning something which will become false or subtly  
> different, depending on the vendors and platforms? That's not
> pedagogic.
> 

If I may barge in here, it is very much possible to write good working
Ada programs using just a very small part of the language, you don't
need to know or use every feature Ada has to offer -- The benefit
however is that when you do need the functionality it's there. Once you
get a hang of the language you can possibly write small test programs
equally fast with the added benefit that you can easily modularize
and reorganize your code to use it in a larger project. And what Yannick
Duchêne wrote concerning portability is also a good point -- why use
some vendor dialect when you can use standardized and highly portable
language...

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Oliver Kleinke]

Am Tue, 27 Aug 2013 16:47:35 +0200
schrieb Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>:

> Le Thu, 04 Jul 2013 20:18:09 +0200, Niklas Holsti  
> <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> a écrit:
> > Complex functionality that is presented as a library with an API
> > often *looks* simple, because the API documentation seldom bothers
> > to explain all the concepts, constraints, and pitfalls, so it looks
> > like there is a ready solution (= a function call) for every need.
> > This means that you can start coding something quickly, and only
> > discover the problems later. In contrast, if you try to learn Ada
> > tasking from the Ada RM, there is a lot of text, with some complex
> > ideas and issues, plus the flexible syntax that you have master
> > well enough to select the forms you need. Better in the end, of
> > course.
> 
> I agree with Jean‑Pierre. Don't suggest one to learn Ada from the RM.
> You can do it yourself if you know what you do, but don't recommend
> the same to someone else.
> 
> For a non‑beginner (suppose a minimal prior knowledge), a better
> starting point, concise and rather complete except with respect to
> Ada 2012 is:
> http://www.adaic.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Ada-Distilled-24-January-2011-Ada-2005-Version.pdf
> Then complete it with the introduction to what Ada 2012 added in:
> http://www.adacore.com/uploads/technical-papers/Ada2012_Rational_Introducion.pdf
> 
> 

Then there's also Ada for Software Engineers by M. Ben-Ari which
dissects and draws references to the RM in a more didactic fashion and
is definately a good read if you want to have something that touches the
nuances of the language in a concise and formal fashion.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 23:08:16 +0200, Gour <gour@atmarama.net> a écrit:
> By looking at the table comparing the two languages
> (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguagesVersusD), it seems to
> me they are pretty close without any having some outstanding features
> which would be insurmountable.

The table says there is no unit testing in Ada while it says D provides  
it. At least they are wrong about Ada, as there is AUnit (comes in two  
incompatible different flavours, the FSF and GPL ones, but it's there),  
which as its name suggest, is to Ada, what JUnit is to Java.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Wed, 28 Aug 2013 01:37:27 +0200, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)  
<yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> a écrit:

> Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 23:08:16 +0200, Gour <gour@atmarama.net> a écrit:
>> By looking at the table comparing the two languages
>> (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguagesVersusD), it seems to
>> me they are pretty close without any having some outstanding features
>> which would be insurmountable.
>
> The table says there is no unit testing in Ada while it says D provides  
> it. At least they are wrong about Ada, as there is AUnit (comes in two  
> incompatible different flavours, the FSF and GPL ones, but it's there),  
> which as its name suggest, is to Ada, what JUnit is to Java.

The same with Guaranteed initialization. Ada has the unknown discriminant,  
which force initialization, and has the initialization/finalization or  
controlled types.

I guess there are other errors in this table. I won't try to search for  
all, at least the existence of error is pointed to your attention.


-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Oliver Kleinke]

Am Wed, 28 Aug 2013 01:40:16 +0200
schrieb Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>:

> Le Wed, 28 Aug 2013 01:37:27 +0200, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)  
> <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> a écrit:
> 
> > Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 23:08:16 +0200, Gour <gour@atmarama.net> a
> > écrit:
> >> By looking at the table comparing the two languages
> >> (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguagesVersusD), it
> >> seems to me they are pretty close without any having some
> >> outstanding features which would be insurmountable.
> >
> > The table says there is no unit testing in Ada while it says D
> > provides it. At least they are wrong about Ada, as there is AUnit
> > (comes in two incompatible different flavours, the FSF and GPL
> > ones, but it's there), which as its name suggest, is to Ada, what
> > JUnit is to Java.
> 
> The same with Guaranteed initialization. Ada has the unknown
> discriminant, which force initialization, and has the
> initialization/finalization or controlled types.
> 
> I guess there are other errors in this table. I won't try to search
> for all, at least the existence of error is pointed to your attention.

And then there is the 'Normalize_Scalars'.. There are a lot more
mistakes in that table. Quote: "They're not trying to sell you on Ada;
trying to sell you on D."

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Simon Wright]

"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 23:08:16 +0200, Gour <gour@atmarama.net> a écrit:
>> By looking at the table comparing the two languages
>> (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguagesVersusD), it seems to
>> me they are pretty close without any having some outstanding features
>> which would be insurmountable.
>
> The table says there is no unit testing in Ada while it says D
> provides it. At least they are wrong about Ada, as there is AUnit
> (comes in two incompatible different flavours, the FSF and GPL ones,
> but it's there), which as its name suggest, is to Ada, what JUnit is
> to Java.

I don't recognise an FSF AUnit? AdaCore used to have (may still have) a
publicly-visible AUnit SVN repo, but they stopped updating it so I went
back to the GNAT GPL version. Of course, no problem using AUnit in
closed-source projects, because you won't be releasing your test
binaries to customers anyway!

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 23:08:16 +0200, Gour wrote:

> By looking at the table comparing the two languages
> (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguagesVersusD), it seems to
> me they are pretty close without any having some outstanding features
> which would be insurmountable.

Such charts make little technical sense for two reasons:

1. Not all features are good, not all of them have no better alternatives.

2. Most languages implement most of their features inconsistently (that
includes Ada). 

There is no consensus, not ever superficial understanding of which features
a good language must have and how these features should be woven into the
fabric of a language. CS sucks as we know. There is no way we could compare
language features objectively.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Gour]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:57:24 +0200
Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:

> If I may say, don't focus too much on GUI as you know it nowadays
> and since a few decades, as this time may be more and more gone in
> the future. I'm currently working (not full time, but I expect it in
> the future) on an application with which the UI will be entirely in a
> browser

Believe that I've heard such proposal many times, something like
'traditional GUIs are dead, browser is the future...' and I'd be very
happy if could imagine my app working like that.

Otoh, I'm aware the planned application consists of user enetering some
data, then performing different calculations (using 3rd party C lib as
well) and render that data graphically on the screen.

After data is rendered, user should be able to easily change some
parameters to refine rendered data as well as do further calculations
along with some other simulation going in 'real' time.

Maybe XEphem (http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/) is good-enough
approximation of the desired app.

Do you have any hint how to do it in browser?

> I've discovered two days ago, a CVS/SCM named Fossil, whose UI is made
> the same way, and which works also as a CGI you can install nearly as
> a drop‑in in any web‑server, and provides the exact same UI from a web
> server as it do when you run it from your desktop (an UI which opens
> in a web‑browser). 

I'm aware of Fossil DVCS and use it exclusively for all my private
stuff. :-)

> Designing an UI as creating a document structure, giving a style and  
> adding user gesture handlers, is easier than creating an UI all by  
> programming using a GUI API. 

That is probably true.

> Even in the age of multimedia and images every where, an UI, is still
> mainly text and text layout; icons and misc graphics does not help
> that much (or even make it worse) and can't replace carefully crafted
> text layout (font family, size, weight, colour, style, decoration,
> indent, justification, and so on, gives more expressive capabilities
> to an UI than any icon set or 3D‑look‑like buttons).

I agree, but in my case I do have need for graphical output.

> That's why I'm not afraid of Ada lacking a standard GUI library.

Having strong support for Qt would be good-enough. D native GUI won't
be available soon.

> Anyway, no GUI libraries could gain wide acceptance. The option of an
> Ada GUI comes back here from time to time, and the replies prove
> there is no hope for a GUI library which could please at least 10% of
> people (more likely there would be 10 different API, one for each of
> these 10%).

If Adacore would focus on Qt instead of GTK, I'll be fine 'cause I do
not see bright future for GTK.

> That said, thanks for mentioning D, as I did not suspect it was
> still there. 

It's and, after they moved to Github, many contributors are there.

GDC might become included in GCC-4.9 toolchain and LLVM-based LDC is
progressing nicely as well.

> Will read about it a future day, out of curiosity, as it
> seems to support design by contract and type constraints as Ada do. I
> just surely won't switch to it, as I don't believe any legacy kind of
> language can go a lot more above with safety than Ada already do, 

Before considering ADA/D, I was thinking about FP-stuff like Haskell
(later considered OCaml, F#), so I want type-safety from the language,
not fiddling with memory at too low-level, dangling pointers bugs etc.
but robust tool to help me having fun with my hobby project which is
going to be developed/maintained for extended period of time. It sounds
as good candidate for Ada. :-)

> For the last words: you mentioned FOSS, saying the FOSS world does
> not like Ada. Well, I don't feel the FOSS world enjoy D a lot more,
> as I've never seen the FOSS mention D until today. 

I'm not aware of any open-source projects done in Ada, while there are
e..g. two D compilers developed for D (ldc, gdc)?

> Just would like to say confusing technique and politic is not good.
> Either you make a choice with technical argument or with political
> intention, but not both, as the latter will near to always want to
> shadow the former (I know it from experience, too much). 

I didn't mean FOSS in political sense, but just in pragmatical one...

DMD is also not 100% FOSS and I do not mind, similar with GNAT, but e.g
if one uses Python, Haskell...even FreePascal/Lazarus. it's expected to
be able to attract some contributors and/or get support.

Otoh, it seems to me that Ada open-source community is practically
non-existant which is a bit strange considering that the language itself
is very fine.

> Also keep in mind there is a GPL GNAT, and that if many commercial
> applications choose Ada, this does not prevent to choose it for home
> or freeware or FOSS applications.

Sure, just wonder why no more open-source projects done in Ada and
whether something can be done about it?


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
He is a perfect yogī who, by comparison to his own self, 
sees the true equality of all beings, in both their 
happiness and their distress, O Arjuna!

http://www.atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Gour]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 10:02:58 +0200
"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:

> Such charts make little technical sense for two reasons:

I agree, but it was not meant to provide high technical accuracy - only
brief overview of 'features'.

> There is no consensus, not ever superficial understanding of which
> features a good language must have and how these features should be
> woven into the fabric of a language. CS sucks as we know. There is no
> way we could compare language features objectively.

Well, there is not much invention going on in the language-arena and
'new' languages are mostly just trying to blend some (sub)set of
'language features' into some, hopefully, cohesive package.

Otoh, language features alone are mostly not deciding criteria when
choosing implementation language without considering the whole ecosystem
(libraties, tools support, etc.)


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
The work of a man who is unattached to the modes of material 
nature and who is fully situated in transcendental knowledge 
merges entirely into transcendence.

http://www.atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

Web-UI for Ada applications (Was: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?)

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Gour <gour@atmarama.net> writes:

> Believe that I've heard such proposal many times, something like
> 'traditional GUIs are dead, browser is the future...' and I'd be very
> happy if could imagine my app working like that.

The problem with this is that you both add an extra "OS" layer (the
browser) _and_ require GUI operations to be interpreted (to some extent)
rather than executed as binary code.

> Otoh, I'm aware the planned application consists of user enetering
> some data, then performing different calculations (using 3rd party C
> lib as well) and render that data graphically on the screen.
>
> After data is rendered, user should be able to easily change some
> parameters to refine rendered data as well as do further calculations
> along with some other simulation going in 'real' time.
>
> Maybe XEphem (http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/) is good-enough
> approximation of the desired app.
>
> Do you have any hint how to do it in browser?

Use Dart (or some other event-oriented language) for the processing in
the browser.

Make the calculation (and rendering?) server available through HTTP,
pushing results over a websocket.

This way the users can push tasks from the UI to the server, and the UI
will receive the results (activating an event handler) once they are
available for display.

We are developing an application with a structure similar to this at
AdaHeads.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
Photo of the day (RSS feed):
         http://billeder.sparre-andersen.dk/dagens/feed.rss2

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 11:01:11 +0200, Gour wrote:

> Well, there is not much invention going on in the language-arena and
> 'new' languages are mostly just trying to blend some (sub)set of
> 'language features' into some, hopefully, cohesive package.

There is no reason to believe that. I would compare it with medieval
alchemy. Yes, of course recent 20 years was almost total waste.

> Otoh, language features alone are mostly not deciding criteria when
> choosing implementation language without considering the whole ecosystem
> (libraties, tools support, etc.)

If you have no proper criteria of choice you inevitably switch to more and
more irrelevant things. "Ecosystem" influences our choices of programming
languages as much as it does our choices of food or clothes. Which does not
mean that what we eat or wear or program with is any good or bad.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Gour]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 11:55:00 +0200
"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:

> There is no reason to believe that. I would compare it with medieval
> alchemy. Yes, of course recent 20 years was almost total waste.

:-)

> If you have no proper criteria of choice you inevitably switch to
> more and more irrelevant things. 

That's true, indeed.

> "Ecosystem" influences our choices of programming languages as much as
> it does our choices of food or clothes. Which does not mean that what
> we eat or wear or program with is any good or bad.

I must say you have interesting sense of humour. ;)


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
One who restrains his senses, keeping them under full control, 
and fixes his consciousness upon Me, is known as a man of 
steady intelligence.

http://www.atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications

[Gour]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 11:35:36 +0200
Jacob Sparre Andersen <jacob@jacob-sparre.dk> wrote:

> The problem with this is that you both add an extra "OS" layer (the
> browser) _and_ require GUI operations to be interpreted (to some
> extent) rather than executed as binary code.

I'm not sure I get the 2nd part?

> Use Dart (or some other event-oriented language) for the processing in
> the browser.

Is using Dart/JS less evil than 3rd party GUI lib via Ada bindings?

> Make the calculation (and rendering?) server available through HTTP,
> pushing results over a websocket.

I was already told here about that option and using e.g. ZeroMQ or
something...

> This way the users can push tasks from the UI to the server, and the
> UI will receive the results (activating an event handler) once they
> are available for display.

Do you believe there won't be performance bottleneck for rendering?


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
The working senses are superior to dull matter; mind is higher 
than the senses; intelligence is still higher than the mind; 
and he [the soul] is even higher than the intelligence.

http://www.atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications

[Simon Clubley]

On 2013-08-28, Gour <gour@atmarama.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 11:35:36 +0200
> Jacob Sparre Andersen <jacob@jacob-sparre.dk> wrote:
>
>> The problem with this is that you both add an extra "OS" layer (the
>> browser) _and_ require GUI operations to be interpreted (to some
>> extent) rather than executed as binary code.
>
> I'm not sure I get the 2nd part?
>

When a program which uses, say, the GTK toolkit wants to draw a text box
on the screen, it does it by making a direct subroutine call to the
GTK function from the program itself.

OTOH, if you use HTML input to render a text box in the browser, then the
HTML code is treated as source code input to the browser's rendering
engine and needs to first be translated to a internal format before the
rendering engine can process the HTML code.

IOW, every time the rendering engine reads the HTML input, it needs to
treat it in the same way as, say, a Python or bash interpreter would
treat it's input.

Given the high level nature of pure HTML itself, this should not be too
great a overhead for pure HTML code. However, this can change if the input
also contains a scripting language (such as Javascript) section as well
as the HTML code.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications

[Gour]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 11:32:43 +0000 (UTC)
Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:

> When a program which uses, say, the GTK toolkit wants to draw a text
> box on the screen, it does it by making a direct subroutine call to
> the GTK function from the program itself.

Ahh, OK.

When thinking aobut using browser as the 'common GUI platform', I
naturally assume using JS, so was confused what does suggestion to use
"Dart (or some other event-oriented language) for the processing in
the browser." change in regard?

Maybe some do not consider JS as 'event-oriented language' ?


Sincerely,
Gour


-- 
The senses are so strong and impetuous, O Arjuna, 
that they forcibly carry away the mind even of a man 
of discrimination who is endeavoring to control them.

http://www.atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2013-08-27, Yannick Duchêne <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:50:20 +0200, Simon Clubley  
><clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> a écrit:
>>
>> The problem is that the good support is more important to some learners
>> than a technically better language.
>>
>> I've had a look at the Free Pascal support channels in the past and they
>> appear to be very friendly (for the most part) and understanding of what
>> a person wants to achieve.
>
> On that precise point, my personal experience gave me an opposite feeling.  
> I remember I've re?opened a bug report two times (before I gave up). This  
> was something the documentation said, and the compiler did something else,  
> and that was on a topic as important as visibility of object methods. I  
> opened a bug report saying either the compiler must implement the  
> ?specification? as stated in the documentation, or the documentation must  
> be updated to match what the compiler do. The answer I get was that none  
> of the two will be done and the report was closed immediately. As this was  
> looking totally silly to me and could not believe it, I reopened it two  
> times, with some insistence to repeat either the documentation had to be  
> updated or the compiler fixed, and asking if it was really necessary to  
> fork FPK (they did not enjoyed this sentence) to get a compiler doing what  
> the documentation says, with same result.
>
> Not friendly at all and no understanding neither, and to me, it was not  
> serious.
>

It's amazing how perceptions can be so different. :-)

However, my comments about the other things stands. For example, there
was some recent discussion about people wanting to run Ada on the small
embedded battery powered ARM boards and some people kept suggesting (for
example) large PC-104 sized mains powered x86 boards and (relatively)
large expensive I/O interfaces instead of addressing the hobbyist's
_actual_ needs.

That is just so out of touch with what the typical embedded hobbyist is
doing these days, it's hard to know where to begin and if a hobbyist sees
responses like the above and then compares it to the typical responses
seen in other places, which actually understand the hobbyist's needs,
which language do you think they are going to choose ?

I admit the following statement is harder to define, but I still feel
there is a overall elitist style feel to comp.lang.ada at times which
is not compatible with presenting a warm welcoming feeling to newcomers
thinking of trying Ada for the first time.

> That's precisely this incident (a big one to me at that time), which made  
> me seek for another option. I learned about Oberon (the language and the  
> OS), Modula (misc variants), and Ada, which I already knew in the past but  
> I did not understood at the moment. I finally decided to choose Ada,  
> because Oberon and Modula looked dead to me and because of the existence  
> of an ISO standard.
>

I've gone through this whole process myself, looking for other Wirth
type languages and I keep coming back to Ada. As you say, Modula {2|3}
appears to be dead and while Oberon is still a basis for language
experiments in various forms, no Oberon variant seems to have gathered a
sufficient criticial mass yet to attract people (and hence development)
to it on a ongoing basis.

I keep thinking about Free Pascal but still prefer Ada to it.

But I still wish there were more viable Wirth language options available.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications

[G.B.]

On 28.08.13 13:32, Simon Clubley wrote:
> However, this can change if the input
> also contains a scripting language (such as Javascript) section as well
> as the HTML code.

OTOH, Javascript interpreters of today have evolved
into VMs with JIT compilation. Therefore, the larger
part of Javascript code will not be interpreted, but
be compiled into optimized binary code that JIT
compilers produce. (That includes profile directed
optimization.)

When an Ada program is translated for some VM such
as a JVM or .NET, similar things happen.

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Gour <gour@atmarama.net> writes:

> Is using Dart/JS less evil than 3rd party GUI lib via Ada bindings?

JS is definitely more evil.

I'm not quite sure if Dart or bindings to a non-Ada GUI library are
preferable in general.

>> Make the calculation (and rendering?) server available through HTTP,
>> pushing results over a websocket.
>
> I was already told here about that option and using e.g. ZeroMQ or
> something...

I don't know if ZeroMQ talks HTTP and web-sockets.  We use AWS for that
purpose.

>> This way the users can push tasks from the UI to the server, and the
>> UI will receive the results (activating an event handler) once they
>> are available for display.
>
> Do you believe there won't be performance bottleneck for rendering?

That depends on the task and the chosen solution.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind
 don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -- Dr. Seuss

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications (Was: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?)

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Wed, 28 Aug 2013 11:35:36 +0200, Jacob Sparre Andersen  
<jacob@jacob-sparre.dk> a écrit:
> We are developing an application with a structure similar to this at
> AdaHeads.

Is this, this one AdaHeads: http://tpweb.adaheads.com/ ?

You said “we”: is this a tiny company?


-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:32:43 +0200, Simon Clubley  
<clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> a écrit:

> On 2013-08-28, Gour <gour@atmarama.net> wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 11:35:36 +0200
>> Jacob Sparre Andersen <jacob@jacob-sparre.dk> wrote:
>>
>>> The problem with this is that you both add an extra "OS" layer (the
>>> browser) _and_ require GUI operations to be interpreted (to some
>>> extent) rather than executed as binary code.
>>
>> I'm not sure I get the 2nd part?
>>
>
> When a program which uses, say, the GTK toolkit wants to draw a text box
> on the screen, it does it by making a direct subroutine call to the
> GTK function from the program itself.
>
> OTOH, if you use HTML input to render a text box in the browser, then the
> HTML code is treated as source code input to the browser's rendering
> engine and needs to first be translated to a internal format before the
> rendering engine can process the HTML code.
>
> IOW, every time the rendering engine reads the HTML input, it needs to
> treat it in the same way as, say, a Python or bash interpreter would
> treat it's input.

Not an issue if the page's content is kept reasonably small. No UI is  
handy when it presents a too big page or too many things anyway. There is  
an issue with, as an example, long text documents (I did such an  
application in the past, an XML editor, but with FPK, not Ada), but I  
believe the issue here is the editor specification (the editor is just an  
example), which should not be expected to display a  
mega‑characters/mega‑bytes document as a single piece, and something is  
broken in what we expects from some UI. The issue was not the browser in  
such, it was my lack of proper analysis at design time (well, I was aware  
of this potential issue, but had to save time… that was the real reason  
why).

Software components should always be designed like Ada types are designed,  
I mean, with real world constraints and limitations in mind, and that's  
applicable to UI too. If you design an UI as naïvely as most programming  
languages let you “design” numeric types, letting you believe there is no  
limitation and you don't have to bother about it, you will get some  
issues, inevitably (*). If you do the Ada way, and think bounds and  
constraint when designing the UI, you may get ride of parts of the issue  
you are pointing.

Computation cost of a typical, is ridiculously small (I don't count  
multimedia rendering, which is not part of the UI to me, although it may  
be a component hosted in an UI).


(*) Although I my self did the same error at one time, it always been  
astonishing to me, all editors I known, tries to open a thousand  
mega‑bytes document with no proper handling or limitations, and that's  
obviously even more an issue in an UI running in a web‑browser, but that  
still not the real issue to me, as I feel the real issue, is to believe it  
can be expected to work fine this way. It can't.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Wed, 28 Aug 2013 14:05:37 +0200, G.B.  
<rm-dash-bau-haus@dash.futureapps.de> a écrit:

> On 28.08.13 13:32, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> However, this can change if the input
>> also contains a scripting language (such as Javascript) section as well
>> as the HTML code.
>
> OTOH, Javascript interpreters of today have evolved
> into VMs with JIT compilation. Therefore, the larger
> part of Javascript code will not be interpreted, but
> be compiled into optimized binary code that JIT
> compilers produce. (That includes profile directed
> optimization.)

Still don't expect too much of it. It still have more server limitation  
than native binaries (noticed in practice, not a gratuitous belief),  
mainly due to automated (not application's specific needs aware) memory  
management I believe, then bad memory management again due to the lack of  
proper type definitions and representations (everything is an  
hash‑lookup‑associative table), and less importantly, due to the start up  
overhead. JIT, even with good hot‑path optimization, do solve only a tiny  
part of the efficiency issues (not to mention these languages are not well  
suited to large scale design nor to trustability, even if JavaScript is  
more predictable than PHP, Python and others).

My point of view, is to restrict it to user gesture handling, and to  
delegate all the processing to a native application written in an  
appropriate language (to implicitly name Ada).

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Web-UI for Ada applications

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Yannick Duchêne wrote:

> Is this, this one AdaHeads: http://tpweb.adaheads.com/ ?

Sort of.  That is a new web-site our intern is working on.  The content
on the site seems mostly wrong.  I've asked him to block general access
to the site until it is done.

> You said “we”: is this a tiny company?

Yes.  Four software developers (including our intern), one UI designer
and one CFO.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
»I'm perfectly happy with my current delusional system.«
                                           -- Mirabel Tanner

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Maurizio Tomasi]

On Wednesday, August 28, 2013 1:37:27 AM UTC+2, Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne) wrote:
> The table says there is no unit testing in Ada while it says D provides  
> it. At least they are wrong about Ada, as there is AUnit (comes in two  
> incompatible different flavours, the FSF and GPL ones, but it's there),  
> which as its name suggest, is to Ada, what JUnit is to Java.

It is not the same thing. Ada needs an external library, while the D language provides built-in support. Unit tests can be run by the compiler using an appropriate switch, see http://dlang.org/unittest.html.

Maurizio.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Shark8]

On Saturday, August 31, 2013 9:04:51 PM UTC-6, Maurizio Tomasi wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 28, 2013 1:37:27 AM UTC+2, Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne) wrote:
> 
> > The table says there is no unit testing in Ada while it says D provides  
> > it. At least they are wrong about Ada, as there is AUnit (comes in two  
> > incompatible different flavours, the FSF and GPL ones, but it's there),  
> > which as its name suggest, is to Ada, what JUnit is to Java.
> 
> It is not the same thing. Ada needs an external library, while the D language provides built-in support. Unit tests can be run by the compiler using an appropriate switch, see http://dlang.org/unittest.html.

IOW, the same difference between Ada's TASK and most C-style languages WRT concurrency.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[girobusan]

I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:

a) Cross platform 
b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice

I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and get a working Mac app. That's amazing. 

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Jeffrey R. Carter]

On 03/14/2016 08:29 AM, girobusan@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:
> 
> a) Cross platform 
> b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice
> 
> I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and get a working Mac app. That's amazing. 

I can do the same with Ada. Indeed, I had a GUI Ada program that compiled and
ran on Windows and Linux with no code changes a couple of decades ago. As usual,
other languages are playing catch up.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"If you think you got a nasty taunting this time,
you ain't heard nothing yet!"
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
23

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On 2016-03-14 19:19, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> On 03/14/2016 08:29 AM, girobusan@gmail.com wrote:
>> I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:
>>
>> a) Cross platform
>> b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice
>>
>> I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and get a working Mac app. That's amazing.
>
> I can do the same with Ada. Indeed, I had a GUI Ada program that compiled and
> ran on Windows and Linux with no code changes a couple of decades ago. As usual,
> other languages are playing catch up.

I have Turbo Pascal sources from early 90's. Would they compile? 
Something tells me they won't. Ada sources from the same period of time 
still do.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Randy Brukardt]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:nc71j7$4p2$1@gioia.aioe.org...
> On 2016-03-14 19:19, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
>> On 03/14/2016 08:29 AM, girobusan@gmail.com wrote:
>>> I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:
>>>
>>> a) Cross platform
>>> b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice
>>>
>>> I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and get 
>>> a working Mac app. That's amazing.
>>
>> I can do the same with Ada. Indeed, I had a GUI Ada program that compiled 
>> and
>> ran on Windows and Linux with no code changes a couple of decades ago. As 
>> usual,
>> other languages are playing catch up.
>
> I have Turbo Pascal sources from early 90's. Would they compile? Something 
> tells me they won't. Ada sources from the same period of time still do.

And even more importantly, they'll still work, too. There's very little 
chance of running into something that's changed in Ada in the intervening 
years, and even less chance that it would change how the program works.

                                  Randy.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[egarrulo]

On 14/03/16 19:19, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> On 03/14/2016 08:29 AM, girobusan@gmail.com wrote:
>> I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:
>>
>> a) Cross platform
>> b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice
>>
>> I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and get a working Mac app. That's amazing.
>
> I can do the same with Ada. Indeed, I had a GUI Ada program that compiled and
> ran on Windows and Linux with no code changes a couple of decades ago. As usual,
> other languages are playing catch up.
>

Lazarus is not a cross-platform GUI builder only. It is a complete IDE 
that can cross-compile.  AFAIK, Ada lacks a comparable proposition.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On 15/03/2016 10:04, egarrulo wrote:
> On 14/03/16 19:19, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
>> On 03/14/2016 08:29 AM, girobusan@gmail.com wrote:
>>> I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:
>>>
>>> a) Cross platform
>>> b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice
>>>
>>> I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and
>>> get a working Mac app. That's amazing.
>>
>> I can do the same with Ada. Indeed, I had a GUI Ada program that
>> compiled and
>> ran on Windows and Linux with no code changes a couple of decades ago.
>> As usual,
>> other languages are playing catch up.
>>
>
> Lazarus is not a cross-platform GUI builder only. It is a complete IDE
> that can cross-compile.  AFAIK, Ada lacks a comparable proposition.

Right now I'm compiling an Ada project for VxWorks target under Windows, 
in GPS.

[ All this has little or nothing to do with the IDE. Practically any IDE 
can cross compile. Common problems are with setting up GCC environment 
to enable cross-compiling, binding and linking. And yes, GPS supports 
remote debugging, well, if you have guts for using GDB, but that's 
another story ]

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[egarrulo]

On 15/03/16 10:34, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On 15/03/2016 10:04, egarrulo wrote:
>> Lazarus is not a cross-platform GUI builder only. It is a complete IDE
>> that can cross-compile.  AFAIK, Ada lacks a comparable proposition.
>
> Right now I'm compiling an Ada project for VxWorks target under Windows,
> in GPS.
>
> [ All this has little or nothing to do with the IDE. Practically any IDE
> can cross compile. Common problems are with setting up GCC environment
> to enable cross-compiling, binding and linking. And yes, GPS supports
> remote debugging, well, if you have guts for using GDB, but that's
> another story ]

I should have been clearer.  I meant that Lazarus is a more complete IDE 
than GPS because Lazarus lets you both design your GUIs and 
cross-compile.  IMO, the more tasks an IDE lets you perform without 
leaving the IDE, the better it is for a hobbyist.

I forgot to mention that Object Pascal also offers fast compilations, 
which aid iterative development.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On 15/03/2016 10:56, egarrulo wrote:
> On 15/03/16 10:34, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> On 15/03/2016 10:04, egarrulo wrote:
>>> Lazarus is not a cross-platform GUI builder only. It is a complete IDE
>>> that can cross-compile.  AFAIK, Ada lacks a comparable proposition.
>>
>> Right now I'm compiling an Ada project for VxWorks target under Windows,
>> in GPS.
>>
>> [ All this has little or nothing to do with the IDE. Practically any IDE
>> can cross compile. Common problems are with setting up GCC environment
>> to enable cross-compiling, binding and linking. And yes, GPS supports
>> remote debugging, well, if you have guts for using GDB, but that's
>> another story ]
>
> I should have been clearer.  I meant that Lazarus is a more complete IDE
> than GPS because Lazarus lets you both design your GUIs and
> cross-compile.

Which is not desirable for cross-compiling. Embedded targets have 
special requirements on GUI, tailored for the hardware, safety, 
application field, corporate look-and-feel etc. GUI builders all being 
rather useless for non-embedded targets are just prohibitive for the 
embedded ones.

The recent trend in embedded goes towards HTTP-based GUI, where GUI is 
not an integral part of the target. So, basically, it is either specific 
or HTTP, right now.

> IMO, the more tasks an IDE lets you perform without
> leaving the IDE, the better it is for a hobbyist.

It is difficult to judge what is better for hobbyists. All depends on 
the background of concrete people. But usually people interested in 
cross-compilers are less inclined to IDEs and more to raw hacking.

> I forgot to mention that Object Pascal also offers fast compilations,
> which aid iterative development.

Well, XP, TDD etc aren't really working for embedded (not that they do 
in other application fields). Uploading and rebooting times alone make 
it impossible, even for a hobbyist, with nothing else to do.

Ada users are more inclined to the opposite approach anyway, so, SPARK.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[egarrulo]

On 15/03/16 11:23, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> It is difficult to judge what is better for hobbyists. All depends on
> the background of concrete people. But usually people interested in
> cross-compilers are less inclined to IDEs and more to raw hacking.

I agree that the background of people is what matters the most but, in 
general, I think that whatever is easier to use is better for hobbyists. 
  Object Pascal was designed for RAD, therefore it prioritized ease of 
use, and so did its IDEs.  Ada had different design goals, which make 
Ada more difficult for hobbyists.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Bob Butler]

On 2016-03-14, Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> On 2016-03-14 19:19, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
>> On 03/14/2016 08:29 AM, girobusan@gmail.com wrote:
>>> I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:
>>>
>>> a) Cross platform
>>> b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice
>>>
>>> I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and get a working Mac app. That's amazing.
>>
>> I can do the same with Ada. Indeed, I had a GUI Ada program that compiled and
>> ran on Windows and Linux with no code changes a couple of decades ago. As usual,
>> other languages are playing catch up.
>
> I have Turbo Pascal sources from early 90's. Would they compile? 

Sure, you can run Turbo Pascal under DOS on real hardware or emulated.

> Something tells me they won't. Ada sources from the same period of time 
> still do.

There's a little bit of a difference there. Turbo Pascal was a proprietary
language not a standardized one.

Bob

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[egarrulo]

On 15/03/16 11:31, egarrulo wrote:
> I agree that the background of people is what matters the most

But then, when someone comes and asks such a generic question, he 
obviously doesn't know what he is talking about, and he elicits a 
matching answer.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[G.B.]

On 15.03.16 11:53, egarrulo wrote:
> On 15/03/16 11:31, egarrulo wrote:
>> I agree that the background of people is what matters the most
>
> But then, when someone comes and asks such a generic question, he
> obviously doesn't know what he is talking about, and he elicits a
> matching answer.

It is interesting that some still maintain the idea
that portable GUI programming has a place. It hasn't,
with a possible exception of big corporate legacy.

Nor does any of the mainstream languages define anything
in the language that specifically addresses GUI things.

This hobby horse is riding towards a dead end, in solitude.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[egarrulo]

On 15/03/16 14:18, G.B. wrote:
> On 15.03.16 11:53, egarrulo wrote:
>> On 15/03/16 11:31, egarrulo wrote:
>>> I agree that the background of people is what matters the most
>>
>> But then, when someone comes and asks such a generic question, he
>> obviously doesn't know what he is talking about, and he elicits a
>> matching answer.
>
> It is interesting that some still maintain the idea
> that portable GUI programming has a place. It hasn't,
> with a possible exception of big corporate legacy.

Even if there were a RAD IDE for GUI applications based on 
HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I wouldn't have recommended it anyway, because 
JavaScript - with all its pitfalls - is hardly a language that is 
suitable for hobbyists.  GUI programming done the old way is still the 
easier route for a hobbyist programmer.

> Nor does any of the mainstream languages define anything
> in the language that specifically addresses GUI things.

Java, C# and Python all ship with GUI support.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[G.B.]

On 15.03.16 14:52, egarrulo wrote:

>> Nor does any of the mainstream languages define anything
>> in the language that specifically addresses GUI things.
>
> Java, C# and Python all ship with GUI support.

Ada ships with GUI support if you pick the proper
shipment unit, and so does C. But neither language
supports GUIs in the language proper. Nor do C++, C#, ...

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[egarrulo]

On 15/03/16 15:28, G.B. wrote:
> On 15.03.16 14:52, egarrulo wrote:
>
>>> Nor does any of the mainstream languages define anything
>>> in the language that specifically addresses GUI things.
>>
>> Java, C# and Python all ship with GUI support.
>
> Ada ships with GUI support if you pick the proper
> shipment unit, and so does C. But neither language
> supports GUIs in the language proper. Nor do C++, C#, ...
>

What do you mean?  Anyway, a programming environment is much more than 
its language, hence my stress on "RAD IDE".  Everything else being 
equal, I would recommend Ada over Object Pascal, but since I know no Ada 
IDE that matches Lazarus, I must recommend Object Pascal.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[G.B.]

On 15.03.16 14:18, G.B. wrote:
>
> Nor does any of the mainstream languages define anything
> in the language that specifically addresses GUI things.

BTW, some portable GUI related ideas such as OpenGL _could_
have portable operators forthcoming, insofar as operators
involve general practice like manipulating vectors. These
objects tend to be representable in many languages.

But, alas, APL's choice of symbols was too large, the
language designers went too far for that idea to be appreciated
as what it is: serious.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Nasser M. Abbasi]

On 3/15/2016 5:31 AM, egarrulo wrote:
> On 15/03/16 11:23, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> It is difficult to judge what is better for hobbyists. All depends on
>> the background of concrete people. But usually people interested in
>> cross-compilers are less inclined to IDEs and more to raw hacking.
>
> I agree that the background of people is what matters the most but, in
> general, I think that whatever is easier to use is better for hobbyists.
>    Object Pascal was designed for RAD, therefore it prioritized ease of
> use, and so did its IDEs.  Ada had different design goals, which make
> Ada more difficult for hobbyists.
>

I have been thinking of trying Lazarus myself for sometime. I am
looking for nice language I can use to make GUI with and apps
for the desktop (simulation, etc...). But do not like c/c++. So Qt is
not for me. Pascal is close to Ada and so I like its syntax
more.

I agree that Ada has nothing like RAD and form builder all-in-one
which Lazarus has.

Ada community is really not interested in such things as Ada is
oriented more towards system level stuff and embedded systems. Not
user-level GUI apps, which Lazarus is meant for.

--Nasser

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Nasser M. Abbasi]

On 3/15/2016 9:28 AM, G.B. wrote:

> Ada ships with GUI support if you pick the proper
> shipment unit, and so does C. But neither language
> supports GUIs in the language proper. Nor do C++, C#, ...
>

fyi;

This _might_ change for C++ 2017:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p0267r0.pdf

"A Proposal to Add 2D Graphics Rendering and Display to C++"

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Randy Brukardt]

"Bob Butler" <bob@work.com> wrote in message 
news:nc8pfr$bl8$2@gioia.aioe.org...
> On 2016-03-14, Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
>> On 2016-03-14 19:19, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
>>> On 03/14/2016 08:29 AM, girobusan@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:
>>>>
>>>> a) Cross platform
>>>> b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice
>>>>
>>>> I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and get 
>>>> a working Mac app. That's amazing.
>>>
>>> I can do the same with Ada. Indeed, I had a GUI Ada program that 
>>> compiled and
>>> ran on Windows and Linux with no code changes a couple of decades ago. 
>>> As usual,
>>> other languages are playing catch up.
>>
>> I have Turbo Pascal sources from early 90's. Would they compile?
>
> Sure, you can run Turbo Pascal under DOS on real hardware or emulated.
>
>> Something tells me they won't. Ada sources from the same period of time
>> still do.
>
> There's a little bit of a difference there. Turbo Pascal was a proprietary
> language not a standardized one.

What real Pascal implementation is a "standardized language"? There are lots 
of Pascal standards, but no implementation really follows any of them (in 
part because most of those standards are too limited for practical work). 
(That's one of the reasons behind the Ada trademark and the strong push to 
conformity assessment for Ada - Ada compilers actually implement the 
standard.)

                                 Randy.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Bob Butler]

On 2016-03-15, Randy Brukardt <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
> "Bob Butler" <bob@work.com> wrote in message 
> news:nc8pfr$bl8$2@gioia.aioe.org...
>> On 2016-03-14, Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
>>> On 2016-03-14 19:19, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
>>>> On 03/14/2016 08:29 AM, girobusan@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>> I'm a hobbyist. I've chosen Pascal (Free Pascal) because it is:
>>>>>
>>>>> a) Cross platform
>>>>> b) Has a cross-platform GUI builder (Lazarus) and it's pretty nice
>>>>>
>>>>> I can develop an app on linux, than just drop my sources to Mac and get 
>>>>> a working Mac app. That's amazing.
>>>>
>>>> I can do the same with Ada. Indeed, I had a GUI Ada program that 
>>>> compiled and
>>>> ran on Windows and Linux with no code changes a couple of decades ago. 
>>>> As usual,
>>>> other languages are playing catch up.
>>>
>>> I have Turbo Pascal sources from early 90's. Would they compile?
>>
>> Sure, you can run Turbo Pascal under DOS on real hardware or emulated.
>>
>>> Something tells me they won't. Ada sources from the same period of time
>>> still do.
>>
>> There's a little bit of a difference there. Turbo Pascal was a proprietary
>> language not a standardized one.
>
> What real Pascal implementation is a "standardized language"? 

My point was you can't compare proprietary languages with standardized
ones. Of course if you use a proprietary language supported only by one
vendor you are putting all your eggs in one basket by writing code that has
a limited lifetime.

> There are lots of Pascal standards, but no implementation really follows
> any of them (in part because most of those standards are too limited for
> practical work). 

I am not sure if that is true. It could be FreePascal does support the full
standard (and there are indeed ISO standards to follow) but also OO and GUI
addons. I think a lot of useful code could be written to the standard. It's
just that many people want the OO support and the GUI stuff so they tend
towards specific implementations. I think it's ill advised for businesses
but indeed there are still some using Delphi believe it or not. Most of the
Pascal written today outside Delphi is hobbyist stuff. FPC is actually a
very nice implementation. It's not portable because nothing else is left,
with or without a standard or two.

> (That's one of the reasons behind the Ada trademark and the strong push to 
> conformity assessment for Ada - Ada compilers actually implement the 
> standard.)

I certainly understand the value in that. But in practice the landscape in
Ada is not so much different from that in Pascal. As you well know there has
been a lot of consolidation lately in what was already a very small market.
It may not mean a whole lot that Ada is standardized when there is only one
vendor who tracks the latest standard...

Bob

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Jeremiah]

On Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at 9:52:42 AM UTC-4, EGarrulo wrote:
> Even if there were a RAD IDE for GUI applications based on 
> HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I wouldn't have recommended it anyway, because 
> JavaScript - with all its pitfalls - is hardly a language that is 
> suitable for hobbyists.  GUI programming done the old way is still the 
> easier route for a hobbyist programmer.

There are definitely options out there for web technology based GUI frameworks where the user doesn't need to dabble in javascript or HTML.  Wt for C++ is one example, and Gnoga for Ada is another.  Both work to abstract out all the JS and HTML5 code needed to make the GUI so the programmer can focus programming in the language they do the rest of their code in.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Ludovic Brenta]

Bob Butler writes on comp.lang.ada:
> I am not sure if that is true. It could be FreePascal does support the
> full standard (and there are indeed ISO standards to follow) but also
> OO and GUI addons. I think a lot of useful code could be written to
> the standard. It's just that many people want the OO support and the
> GUI stuff so they tend towards specific implementations. I think it's
> ill advised for businesses but indeed there are still some using
> Delphi believe it or not. Most of the Pascal written today outside
> Delphi is hobbyist stuff. FPC is actually a very nice
> implementation. It's not portable because nothing else is left, with
> or without a standard or two.

The fact that FreePascal supports some ISO or standards is relevant and
useful *if* it can reject non-compliant programs.    But in its list of
compiler options I see only:

  -M<x>  Set language mode to <x>  
      -Mfpc      Free Pascal dialect (default)  
      -Mobjfpc   FPC mode with Object Pascal support  
      -Mdelphi   Delphi 7 compatibility mode  
      -Mtp       TP/BP 7.0 compatibility mode  
      -Mmacpas   Macintosh Pascal dialects compatibility mode  

and no ISO 7185 or ISO 10206.

--
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[brbarkstrom]

On Wednesday, March 16, 2016 at 5:22:02 PM UTC-4, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Bob Butler writes on comp.lang.ada:
> > I am not sure if that is true. It could be FreePascal does support the
> > full standard (and there are indeed ISO standards to follow) but also
> > OO and GUI addons. I think a lot of useful code could be written to
> > the standard. It's just that many people want the OO support and the
> > GUI stuff so they tend towards specific implementations. I think it's
> > ill advised for businesses but indeed there are still some using
> > Delphi believe it or not. Most of the Pascal written today outside
> > Delphi is hobbyist stuff. FPC is actually a very nice
> > implementation. It's not portable because nothing else is left, with
> > or without a standard or two.
> 
> The fact that FreePascal supports some ISO or standards is relevant and
> useful *if* it can reject non-compliant programs.    But in its list of
> compiler options I see only:
> 
>   -M<x>  Set language mode to <x>  
>       -Mfpc      Free Pascal dialect (default)  
>       -Mobjfpc   FPC mode with Object Pascal support  
>       -Mdelphi   Delphi 7 compatibility mode  
>       -Mtp       TP/BP 7.0 compatibility mode  
>       -Mmacpas   Macintosh Pascal dialects compatibility mode  
> 
> and no ISO 7185 or ISO 10206.
> 
> --
> Ludovic Brenta.

It might be worth thinking about the investment in time a "hobbyist" must
spend in becoming proficient in whatever environment he or she is working
in.  At one point or another in the last thirty years, I wandered through
FORTRAN, Pascal, Modula II, and Ada, with an occasional segue into Perl
or Python or even R or OpenBUGS.  It seems to me that Ada is a pretty good
general purpose language for almost any application, including concurrent
programming systems.  The minimum time investment is probably about six
months -- although in the last 25 years, we've been inventing languages
of the day at a rate of at least one every week.  GUI's are fairly 
straightforward to write in HTML5 and CSS3.3 (get the Dummies book).

The harder part is to document what you've done and what you've learned
in a form that users can use later.  The Web is littered with discarded
projects that became standards and were then abandoned by their PhD developers
who moved on to other projects (see IsaViz at <https://www.w3.org/2001/11/IsaViz/}.  You'll find a W3C project that's in the usual limbo left when
someone goes off and leaves a project without maintenance personnel).

My own impression is a "hobbyist" developer's time would be better spent
becoming competent with a good, general purpose language and then making
sure his or her work is completely documented as they move toward more
complex projects.  Concentrating on the minutiae of GUI interfaces and
related issues is highly likely to be wasted time.  Having a programming
language whose IDE helps the developer avoid mistakes and can track
versions is time invested in not losing time to those errors.

Bruce B.

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Bob Butler]

On 2016-03-16, Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
> Bob Butler writes on comp.lang.ada:
>> I am not sure if that is true. It could be FreePascal does support the
>> full standard (and there are indeed ISO standards to follow) but also
>> OO and GUI addons. I think a lot of useful code could be written to
>> the standard. It's just that many people want the OO support and the
>> GUI stuff so they tend towards specific implementations. I think it's
>> ill advised for businesses but indeed there are still some using
>> Delphi believe it or not. Most of the Pascal written today outside
>> Delphi is hobbyist stuff. FPC is actually a very nice
>> implementation. It's not portable because nothing else is left, with
>> or without a standard or two.
>
> The fact that FreePascal supports some ISO or standards is relevant and
> useful *if* it can reject non-compliant programs.

Oh really? You can't tell by gcc. What incantation do you use to even get
all the warnings? If you ask they will tell you it's not the compiler's job
to catch incorrect code. If you give it correct code it will probably
produce a representative executable. If not, all bets are off.

I already explained some possible reasons for FPC's non-portability. I think
my paragraph above explains things clearly enough and I don't agree with
your statement here. It is valuable to have a toolchain that supports
standards whether or not it also supports a superset. If it can warn on
extensions so much the better. If not, it's more than worth price paid.


>    But in its list of
> compiler options I see only:
>
>   -M<x>  Set language mode to <x>  
>       -Mfpc      Free Pascal dialect (default)  
>       -Mobjfpc   FPC mode with Object Pascal support  
>       -Mdelphi   Delphi 7 compatibility mode  
>       -Mtp       TP/BP 7.0 compatibility mode  
>       -Mmacpas   Macintosh Pascal dialects compatibility mode  
>
> and no ISO 7185 or ISO 10206.

You could ask the right people if you're interested enough. If not, not.

Bob

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[gautier_niouzes]

Le jeudi 17 mars 2016 08:59:52 UTC+1, Bob Butler a écrit :

> I already explained some possible reasons for FPC's non-portability. I think
> my paragraph above explains things clearly enough and I don't agree with
> your statement here. It is valuable to have a toolchain that supports
> standards whether or not it also supports a superset. If it can warn on
> extensions so much the better. If not, it's more than worth price paid.

I think there is a confusion here. The dialects listed here:

  Free Pascal dialect (default)  
  FPC mode with Object Pascal support  
  Delphi 7 compatibility mode  
  TP/BP 7.0 compatibility mode  
  Macintosh Pascal dialects compatibility mode  

are *not* supersets of any of both ISO Pascals. They are merely supersets of a "Hello World"-size subset of these ISO Pascals.
You don't need to go too far into details: the modularity is fully incompatible. What is called "unit" in the descendants of UCSD Pascal listed above is called "module" in ISO 10206 and... nothing at all in the previous ISO 7185. It is not just syntax: the rules for "uses"-ing a "unit" are completely different of those for "import"-ing a "module"...
_________________________ 
Gautier's Ada programming 
http://sf.net/users/gdemont/

Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[sjaniska]

On Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at 3:31:48 PM UTC+1, EGarrulo wrote:

> What do you mean?  Anyway, a programming environment is much more than 
> its language, hence my stress on "RAD IDE".  Everything else being 
> equal, I would recommend Ada over Object Pascal, but since I know no Ada 
> IDE that matches Lazarus, I must recommend Object Pascal.

I was in similar situation, but at the end decided to use D which has 3 compilers (dmd, gdc, ldc) and few option for GUI: tkd & gtkd bindings, DWT - native port of SWT and dlangui - native GUI toolkit.

Sincerely,
Gour