From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Received: by 10.98.1.81 with SMTP id 78mr5234376pfb.1.1458176885272; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 18:08:05 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.182.49.197 with SMTP id w5mr111912obn.16.1458176885209; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 18:08:05 -0700 (PDT) Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.glorb.com!nt3no2304088igb.0!news-out.google.com!k1ni677igd.0!nntp.google.com!nt3no2304085igb.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 18:08:04 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <87zityce4n.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=50.111.126.179; posting-account=Ies7ywoAAACcdHZMiIRy0M84lcJvfxwg NNTP-Posting-Host: 50.111.126.179 References: <87zityce4n.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: <67fc0f9b-fec5-47b2-9934-42fd49e6abef@googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist? From: brbarkstrom@gmail.com Injection-Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 01:08:05 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:29815 Date: 2016-03-16T18:08:04-07:00 List-Id: 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 Set language mode to > -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