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ajhampson wrote: This is also due to Embarcadero's pricing, I'm sure
Yes, indeed. I understand their pain though. They could cut prices and gain some users but would they gain more than they lost? With a language in Delphi's position now it would be debatable.
So they press on with sky-high pricing, knowing that at some point they will lose a critical mass of developers. One can only presume that the owners are pocketing as much of the income as they can while it's still coming in.
I've never done any Delphi projects but I have always liked what I saw with Delphi and I think the world is better with it in it than without it. But, sadly, I know that one say it will go away (and it being cheaper would not necessarily prevent this).
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raddevus wrote: Are people out there still using Delphi? I know many of them.
Personally, I can't stand Pascal syntax.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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For it's time, Pascal was pretty good - way better than the other "pointer based" language that was big at the time: Algol (C didn't come out until two years after Pascal, and took more years to gain real traction). Yes, COBOL had pointers, but ...
The problem is that Pascal is nearly 50 years old, and really shows it's age when you compare it to modern languages, though it's been extended pretty well over the years.
I don't use it - C# these days!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Pascal is good. It's syntax is ugly, though.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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May be ugly, but you never accidentally assigned something in an if condition.
:= All day long. The one thing I truly miss about Delphi.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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Assignment is the most used operator in procedural programming. Choosing a two characters sequence for assignment and just a single character for comparison is rather unfortunate.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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Yeah,
I really LOVE the JS approach of =, ==, ===, ==== (I hope I didn't miss a comparison,
I forget which one means the left side is equal, in context, but not of type, against a mutated version of the Right Hand Side... LOL)
The := jams me up when I switch between other languages, admittedly.
But I will argue that the "." is the most used, as in
sVal := dsCustomer.FieldByName('Value').AsString;
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Kirk 10389821 wrote: sVal := dsCustomer.FieldByName('Value').AsString; I've not written 'procedural' by chance.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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COBOL pointers
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Let's not go there - some of us will have eaten recently ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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05 WS-POINTER-VAR USAGE IS POINTER.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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%%%%%%
%%%% = =
%%C >
_)' _( .' ,
__/ |_/\ " *. o
/` \_\ \/ %`= '_ .
/ ) \/| .^',*. ,
/' /- o/ - " % '_
/\_/ < = , ^ ~ .
)_o|----'| .` '
___// (_ - (\
///-( \' \\
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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lol
I was unaware of that...
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Some later versions of Algol (maybe W and 68R / 68S ?) could emulate pointers but they weren't a feature of 58 or 60. The nearest Algol-60 came to pointers were 'thunks' - functions passed as parameters, which 'modern' languages think that they invented. C is notorious for pointers.
I found Pascal cumbersome - so many meanings of the word END. It's only useful feature was ATFs (anonymous tag fields). Admittedly, my experience of it was mostly porting the P-Code compiler and optimising its expression evaluators.
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Well, you're answer shows that you haven't had a look at current Pascal for at least 30 years...
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Deplhi... ok it is Pascal, never used it. But you can use the same environment with c++ Builder (since more than 20 years).
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Yes, I know that.
In my opinion the documentation is poor (MSDN is much better).
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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CPallini wrote: Personally, I can't stand Pascal syntax.
You can use C ++ instead of Delphi (or together with Delphi) because RAD Studio, which contains both Delphi and C ++ Builder, is able to do (almost) everything Delphi does (regarding supported platforms) and much more than Delphi if you keep I realize it has a C ++17 compiler that consumes many of the open-source libraries out there (including boost libraries).
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Yes, I am aware of that. Your point is similar to the one of Member 15056742 above (however you provide more details). Unfortunately, in my experience, the related documentation is poor (MSDN is far better).
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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CPallini wrote: Yes, I am aware of that. Your point is similar to the one of Member 15056742 above (however you provide more details). Unfortunately, in my experience, the related documentation is poor (MSDN is far better).
Yes, MS is a much larger company than EMB, so it can do a lot better in areas like documentation. Nonetheless, for teams or single developers, productivity is much higher than with MS tools. I don't want to be misunderstood, as I use VS Code a lot, but to have a complete product in a short time, with GUI, networking, complex algorithms, database at any level and which has a very low impact on resources and which has dependencies only on the operating system, Delphi and its cousin C ++ Builder have no equal.
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raddevus wrote: Are people out there still using Delphi? Yes. Just like there's still VB6 apps out there.
Yes, we back; lets not make a fuss, aight?
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Yes offcourse Delphi is still used.
There is a new version every year, and I must say Embarcadero has done a reasonable job at getting Delphi back to the best development environment again. After Delphi 7 Borland made bad choises which finally gave microsoft opportunity to catch up (also getting Anders from Borland into their team helped offcourse)
The only backdraw is its cost, it is much to expensive in my opinion, but given a choise I would get back to Delphi immediate.
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Quote: Are people out there still using Delphi?
Not Delphi specifically, but Lazarus (which compiles Delphi code too) is probably more popular than Delphi at this point in time.
I've been using it and it isn't all that bad.
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I had forgotten about Delphi.
Now I need to go for trauma counseling.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
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I am still actively developing/maintaining an existing Delphi/Oracle application with over 3m lines of code that is not economically viable to migrate onto newer platforms.
Where possible new modules are being added using C#, usually ASP.NET or services but the core application remains Delphi.
The biggest issue I have with Delphi is the lack of modern syntactic sugar, poor out of the box serialization support and difficulty finding code examples anywhere online these days. I agree it should definitely be considered a legacy language.
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