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Programming IT Technology

TurboPower's Delphi Components Going Open 193

Posted by timothy from the better-than-an-orphanage dept.
Luiz Bucci writes "According to the company web site, TurboPower Software announces their immediate withdrawal from the retail component and developer tools market. As part of the move, TurboPower announces its intention to release their award winning component libraries as open source to the maximum extent possible. The resulting open source projects will be hosted on SourceForge." (SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of VA Software). TurboPower's libraries cover "compression, serial communication, faxing, Internet communication, scheduling, data entry, encryption, and XML manipulation."
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TurboPower's Delphi Components Going Open More

TurboPower's Delphi Components Going Open

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  • I like to see more sour e being opened but do we need this? Aren't there better things out there that are already open source?

    • Re:This is nice but is it needed? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What are you talking about? That is like saying "We already have enough music, and I like it some of it, do we really need people to release new music." What damage does releasing more code as open do? If you think it is poorly written, don't use it, but by all means, don't discourage it from being released.
      • I think this is a good thing and i think that this should be released. The thing i dont know is if it is really going to make a big difference. I hear a lot about sources being opened which is good but a lot of it is not worth very much. Most of the time when this type of things happens the code is still usable but is not much of a big help to many people.
    • have you?

      I didn't think so.

  • delphi (Score:3, Interesting)

    by spectral ( 158121 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @01:29AM (#5038215)
    How popular is delphi? I hear about it occasionally but never have really seen any evidence of it being used much..

    Also, any decent samples of what it looks like, or tutorials? Just curious..

    • Re:delphi (Score:2, Informative)

      by shamilton ( 619422 )

      It is worth trying, especially if you fumble around trying to create GUIs in MSVC. If you know what to look for, you can pick out apps written in Delphi pretty easily.

      I used it primarily for about five years.

      sh

    • How popular is delphi? I hear about it occasionally but never have really seen any evidence of it being used much..
      By the looks of many Windoze free/shareware you see about, I'd say it's more popular than Delphi would care to admit...

    • Re:delphi (Score:5, Informative)

      by BagOBones ( 574735 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @01:52AM (#5038291)
      Well you can download a demo at Borlands website.
      I learned MS C++, MFC programing before finding Delphi. Borlands IDE makes development quick an painless.
      Delphi is most often used as a RAD tool for building frontends to databases, so you see it used A LOT in large companies for inhouse tools, but it is able to build any type of app or dll that you would want.
      Many popular apps are also writen in Delphi but sometimes it takes a keen eye to pick them out.
      HomeSite formerly by Alaire http://www.macromedia.com/software/homesite/
      Motherboard Monitor http://mbm.livewiredev.com/
      Inno Setup Installer http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
      To name a few that you may have heard of

      • Don't Forget (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Lucas Membrane ( 524640 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @02:59AM (#5038476)
        Up until at least version 4, Microsoft's Visual Basic was distributed with some code that was written in Delphi.

        I've seen two web services demos. One by a Borland guy using Delphi 6 when that was new (a little over a year ago IIRC) and the other by an MS guy using C# about 2 months ago. The Borland guy put together things that worked and did it quickly and impressively. The MS master kept fooling with his own equipment, groping to figure out how to change the font so the audience could see the demo. He couldn't. The demos went downhill from there. He couldn't accomplish more than a third of diddly compared to the Borland guy.

        • Wonderful as Delphi certainly is, I don't recall that Delphi was ever a part of VB1,2 or 3. If memory serves, Delphi didn't exist as a product until sometime between the launch of VB3 and VB4.

          Your memory may vary of course.

        • VB was introduced in 1991. Delphi in early 1995. In very many ways, you could say that the visual design of Delphi was a rip off of VB. That's not to say that Delphi wasn't a huge improvement over VB.
          • Delphi is a spin off of Turbo bascal, which pre-dates Visual Basic. Borland spent the time to get it right, releasing Object Pascal and Delphi in 1995. VB didn't get OO until .Net in 2001.
        • I've seen two web services demos. One by a Borland guy using Delphi 6 when that was new (a little over a year ago IIRC) and the other by an MS guy using C# about 2 months ago. The Borland guy put together things that worked and did it quickly and impressively. The MS master kept fooling with his own equipment, groping to figure out how to change the font so the audience could see the demo. He couldn't. The demos went downhill from there. He couldn't accomplish more than a third of diddly compared to the Borland guy.

          I've never used Delphi or C# but I fail to how C# could be inferred as beeing inferior or poorer than Delphi based on this experience of yours.

          It sounds like the problems you hilighted were more to do with the individual programmer rather than the language itself.

        • Re:Don't Forget (Score:2, Informative)

          by SAN1701 ( 537455 )
          disclaimer: I'm a BIG Delphi Fan

          After Delphi-2, M$ hired Delphi Chief Architect, Anders Hejlsberg (somewhat admitting Delphi was far superior). If, after that, VB has portions written in Delphi, I wouldn't be surprised.

          It's important to remember that Hejlsberg is the man behind the .NET framework and C# language itself. .NET framework has many characteristics that Delphi developers already uses. That's why the move to .NET, for Delphi developers, is a easier step than it is for C++, VB or Java Developers.

      • Re:delphi (Score:1, Interesting)

        by JimStoner ( 93831 )
        The most obvious ways to spot a "Delphi" application are:

        1. It uses the Delphi SQL cursor when running a query.

        2. It uses Delphi bitmaps, either on buttons or for application icons.

        I would add TOAD to the list of Delphi products.
      • it is able to build any type of app or dll that you would want.

        (plug) Indeed, it's even capable of writing high performance 3D games [pythianproject.org] (end plug).

        Delphi has long been the standard to which other Windows RAD environments were measured. Unfortunately Borland always focussed very heavily on the database side of things, instead of pushing it as also a very good replacement for VB, ie for more general purpose apps.

        Too bad they slaughtered it while porting to Linux. Kylix is nowhere near as good as Delphi is :(

    • It's suprprising popular in the corporate world, it's also very popular in poland, russia. It's also got a cult following in the US.

      All and all it seems to have made more of an impact outside the US tne inside the US which is not surprising considering the dominance of MS.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:delphi (Score:3, Informative)

      by FearUncertaintyDoubt ( 578295 )
      Delphi is more popular in Europe, especially eastern Europe. One thing to realize is that delphi has a great IDE, and builds lean, fast executables and pascal is easier for many people to code and maintain than C++, especially given the excellent VCL (visual component library) which makes it very easy to create window-based apps. While Java and .NET have changed the landscape in the U.S., in places where people are still running on old hardware such as, say, Pentium Pro-based servers, lean and fast is still very much needed.

      I've always thought that delphi deserves more respect than it gets. I use it all the time to make DLLs that function as plug-ins for a video editing package written in C++.

      • I don't think you're using the same Delphi I am :P Fast RAD, yes. Decent IDE, it's got some very nice features but lacks a bunch that I pretty much rely upon, the VCL is excellent in theory (few flaws in implementation, but by and large excellent), and the compiler is lightning fast, but it certainly doesn't make lean executables - in fact, it's notorious for big once. To prevent the need for a runtime, all the VCLs are compiled statically, and a default "hello world" starts out at around 500k.

        And I can't stand pascal syntax, but that's just a personal preference - I still use Delphi alot.

    • Re:delphi (Score:3, Interesting)

      by KyleCordes ( 10679 )
      Delphi is not very popular for "enterprise" development. However, it is quite popular for shrinkwrap software development, especially vertical market apps. Moreover, many companies that use Delphi, keep quiet about it, don't advertise it in their job ads, etc. Since Delphi-produced apps can compile to a single EXE, run very fast, etc., there is no obvious sign to customers that it's a Delphi app. Many Delphi shops like this, and are happy to let customers and competitors assume they are using something else.

  • WOOHOO! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sstamps ( 39313 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @01:30AM (#5038218) Homepage
    As a Turbo Pascal and now Delphi developer, I have used TurboPower components off and on for many moons.

    I hate it that they are leaving the retail scene, but I am glad that they are leaving behind one of the best libraries Turbo Pascal/Delphi ever had.

    My hat's off to them for this bold move. Now if we could just get an open-source Delphi-compliant compiler on Linux, I'd be happy. Yeah Free Pascal is pretty good; I use it, but it is not yet up to the level of Delphi under Windows in terms of features and libraries. [freepascal.org]

    • Re:WOOHOO! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @02:12AM (#5038341) Homepage
      Now if we could just get an open-source Delphi-compliant compiler on Linux, I'd be happy.

      Have you not heard of Kylix Open Edition? You can't be refusing to use it just because the compiler itself is not open source since you just said you use Delphi. Download it and give it a whirl. The new version lets you program in Object Pascal or C++.
      Kylix 3 Open Edition free download [borland.com]

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Have you not heard of Kylix Open Edition? You can't be refusing to use it just because the compiler itself is not open source since you just said you use Delphi.

        Kylix Open Edition is only licensed for the creation of GNU GPL programs. The TurboPower components will be released under the MPL.

        Unless the TurboPower components are dual licensed under a GPL-compatible license, they will not be of much use with Kylix Open Edition.

    • Re:WOOHOO! (Score:1, Informative)

      by JPawloski ( 546146 )
      Given the way TurboPower ships most of it's components, I'd actually think this will not be much of a problem.

      Pretty much when you bought a license of one of their components (such as AsyncPro), you got the source. One of my friends found a few bugs in AsyncPro, worked out how to fix them, and then alerted TurboPower about the bug and the fix. So the source has previously had a number of eyes outside of TurboPower actually reviewing it.

      Plus (as I mention elsewhere) TurboPower have already got quite a number of their components working under Kylix, and seem pretty clueful on the whole. They seemed to have an attitude of "well, we need this, so let's write it ourselves!" rather than always resorting to high level API's or 3rd party modules.
      • Really this type of component libraries with sources is pretty common in Delphi Community, at least in my company we don't by a component library that don't came with sources, even paying the higher prices for they.
        More than once the to have the source save the project limit line.
      • Please explain why your comment is identical to that made by Cef (below) twenty minutes before...?
    • Best? No, TeeMach Tee Chart Pro [teemach.com] has my vote ... ;-)

      It is sad to see them go though, I did like most of the components they produced. I blame this failure on Microsoft's success in capturing the windows development tools market. They had a good solid product.

      This is the second Delphi tools company I've seen open source the tools when they exited the market. The other was component create.

      Delphi has been primary RAD for 5 years and counting (and no I won't touch DB's or MS compiler's)

  • this is wonderful news, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jfroebe ( 10351 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @01:37AM (#5038239) Homepage
    Many of the components may be developed using licensed code from other companies and/or covered under 3rd party patents.

    Before we open up the champagne, let's see just how many of the components will be in a usable form for new development.

    jason

    • Re:this is wonderful news, but.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Cef ( 28324 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @02:02AM (#5038315)
      Given the way TurboPower ships most of it's components, I'd actually think this will not be much of a problem.

      Pretty much when you bought a license of one of their components (such as AsyncPro), you got the source. One of my friends found a few bugs in AsyncPro, worked out how to fix them, and then alerted TurboPower about the bug and the fix. So the source has previously had a number of eyes outside of TurboPower actually reviewing it.

      Plus (as I mention elsewhere) TurboPower have already got quite a number of their components working under Kylix, and seem pretty clueful on the whole. They seemed to have an attitude of "well, we need this, so lets write it ourselves!" rather than always resorting to high level API's or 3rd party modules.

  • I wonder... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by leecho ( 627827 )
    How long before we see some Kylix versions around?

    • Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jfroebe ( 10351 )
      if they contain a great deal of win32 specific code, then a while. if little or no win32 specific code, then a few weeks after release.

      jason
    • They have Kylix version of a few of their products (systools and the async toolkit)

    • Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Cef ( 28324 )
      A number of TurboPower's components (such as AsyncPro) are already available for Kylix. Also TurboPower were known for helping out Borland with Kylix, particularly by helping pioneer a number of components moving to Kylix.

  • The Cult of Delphi (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @01:42AM (#5038256)
    I still use delphi after initially working on a large project with it about 6 years ago.

    I still find it to be an exellent tool for whipping up small windowed apps for my own personal use. I find it to be fast and stable, and object pascal is a very nice language. As well, there is a large community of developers and open source code out there.

    Delphi does have a bit of a 'cult' following. The largest user base, as far as I am aware, is in Russia.

    All of the Russian developers at work love it, and they can't understand why we don't use Delphi (instead of the company mandated J2EE web-app architechture) to write small apps that only have a handful of users.
  • Are these usable with GNU Pascal [gnu-pascal.de] or Free Pascal [freepascal.org]?
    • GNU Pascal uses ISO Pascal syntax which is quite different than the Borland dialect. So convert the Turbo Power to GNU Pascal could be pretty involved. On the other hand, the Free Pascal has a Delphi compatible mode. So compile Turbo Power in Free Pascal should not be a big problem. The only question is how many of the components depends on VCL. The Free Pascal is still lacking anything equivalent to VCL.

  • good VB alternative (Score:4, Insightful)

    by exhilaration ( 587191 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @01:45AM (#5038267)
    I think this would provide the open source community with a good alternative to VB.

    I don't use Delphi, never have, nor do I plan to, but I'll welcome any product that gives further credibility to open source and free software. And I'll applaud any company that takes a product open source - it takes a lot of guts to release the code to a product that might be supporting your company.

  • Not such great news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by uradu ( 10768 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @02:07AM (#5038334)
    If Delphi were the 800 pound gorilla of development tools, fine, the more companies open their products, the better. But as things are, the last thing Delphi needs is major component vendors throwing in the towel. It's sad because Delphi offers one of the few sane and productive alternatives to Microsoft's painful tools and frameworks (.NET shows promise but isn't there yet in terms of maturity and widespread use).
    • Delphi IS 800 pound gorilla in all the places where decisions on tools are taken not exclusively by suits (based on journal ad sizes) but by developers too. And I'm not even mentioning single-developer projects like most shareware and stuff. Reason - you named it.

      • Re:Not such great news (Score:3, Interesting)

        by uradu ( 10768 )
        > Delphi IS 800 pound gorilla in all the places where
        > decisions on tools are taken not exclusively by suits

        Well, this eliminates the Fortune 500 and any other high-profile companies that industry publications (e.g. eWeek or InfoWorld) watch and target, which leads to a vicious cycle of tighter and tighter embrace of Microsoft tools. You can still sneak in Delphi in various ways into these environments, albeit not as an officially approved too. For example, in this VB (and at times reluctantly VC++) shop I often use Delphi for non-deliverable tools and utilities to save time, and project managers look the other way because they figure that nobody will have to maintain this throw-away code anyway.

        Why reluctantly VC++? Well, once in a while you hit VB's limits, such as not being able to create non-ActiveX DLLs or implement certain COM interfaces (such as those containing method names with underscores), and while management doesn't always fully buy these limitations and thinks you're just making them up to be difficult (how could VB have these limitations--after all, EVERYONE is using it?!) they don't have a technical basis to deny your request and cave.
    • Maybe the availability of powerful and open source controls like this will increase the popularity of Delphi. It would be nice.
    • I know another small software company thinking similarly. Recent economic conditions have hurt the business, they are spending their time on other efforts, and passing the product on to the open source community is a good way to minimize the screwing of their old customers. The Mozilla license also gives them some options to re-enter some day.

      So it's a good thing in the sense that the products won't necessarily die, but not a good sign of things in general.

  • Sad to see them go, glad to see them stay (Score:5, Interesting)

    by toolz ( 2119 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @02:09AM (#5038336) Homepage Journal
    Turbopower has always been uncoventional in its approach, and opensourcing their stuff, rather than taking it down with them, is a clear example of this. Their libraries are extremely useful, very professionally done, well documented and very stable.

    If they work well under Kylix, then this is an unbelievable bonanza for many Delphi/Kylix developers. If opensourcing them makes it easier to port them to be usable under FreePascal, then hallelujah!

    I have been a Turbopower customer since the days of Kim Kokonnen's DOS TSR libs back in the 80s.

    These guys really redefined the concept of customer service then - supporting a newbie programmer like me in Bangalore, India via Compuserve and mail was no joke, but they did it, and they did it well. Would you believe a small company today mailing huge amount of support material to a one-off customer on the other side of the world, at their own cost?

    I was able to build products that earned me a tremendous amount of money in those days, and wouldn't have been able to do so had they not supported me the way they did.

    I moved away from the DOS/Windows platform in the 90s after Linux came onto the scene, and ceased being a developer by the mid-90s (I am "just" a user now ;).

    But I do know whom to thank for my start - that would be Kim, Terry, Julian and the entire bunch of folks at Turbopower.

    I am sad to see Turbopower "go away", but at the same time, I am glad to see that they are at least taking a stab at "immortality" by opensourcing their work.
    • It's nice to see another veteran here who appreciates TurboPower's tradition of great service, culminating now in open sourcing an unprecedented portfolio of code.

      TurboPower has been the class of Delphi's (and BCB's and Kylix's) celebrated aftermarket. But Borland has chosen to sell fewer copies of its products at higher prices, which seems to be working well for Borland but not so well for TurboPower and other aftermarket vendors who are now selling to a smaller market. And with Borland Delphi following Microsoft into .Net, the aftermarket vendors are faced with a difficult transition to a new market with different competitors and different niche needs.

      TurboPower's last product is a .Net bar code library, finished but never commercially released, which is going straight to open source. It was written in C#! How will other Delphi component vendors survive when TurboPower couldn't, especially if they have to compete against TurboPower's free products?

      I don't see how Delphi can do well if its aftermarket can't thrive. I guess Borland can fall back on its Java products, but it's a shame that the Windows market, which is still the bulk of desktop computing, seems to be capitulating to Microsoft.

  • Random thoughts (off-topic) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stikves ( 127823 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @02:14AM (#5038352) Homepage
    I know this is offtopic, but I have somethings to say as a (former) Pascal user.



    Pascal is good in some areas:

    • Pascal is very "neat" (except for pointer syntax, which has been fixed in ObjectPascal/Delphi).
    • It's fast, especially in development time.
    • It's well known and it had been used widely.
    • thus, there is alreasy too much source code and binary components readily available (anybody remembers SWAG?).
    • It's strongly typed (not an advantage for evertone, though).
    • It's object oriented and has a very nice syntax (compare and avarage MFC code with a Delphi one and see).
    • It's portable (thanks to GNU Pascal and FreePascal, the latter is much better).
    • There are already a very sufficient library support for FreePascal (if anything is missing, you can import C libraries easily).
    • It's good for database programming (i do not know why, but some vendors used to mix SQL in Pascal or vice versa).

      However something is missing (except for A^[13] syntax): the applications. There are too many tools (IDEs, RAD tools, libraries). There are many DOS and Windows apps, but it's not used in Linux, yet.

      And here some ideas for using pascal...

      • mod_pascal: OO programming for Apache, with use of existing data access and XML objects.
      • server console: anybody remembers Netware console? Instead of the regular shell, we can start the servers in a special console application, probably using TurboVision or similar.
      • gui applications: Delphi is a very nice and rapid way to deploy GUIs, with Kylix and lazarus [freepascal.org], we can start a gui movement (especailly frontends to various Linux software), until mono [go-mono.com] is ready.
      • marketing: Kylix is there, but not much used. Why not advertise it as a movement path for developers (MFC -> VCL -> CLX -> Linux).


      But I guess we need to finish lazarus [freepascal.org] first :)
    • gui applications: Delphi is a very nice and rapid way to deploy GUIs, with Kylix and lazarus [freepascal.org], we can start a gui movement (especailly frontends to various Linux software), until mono [go-mono.com] is ready.

      While not huge, I do find kylix to be a minor annoyence when it comes to being used as a frontend. We've already got gnome aps with one look, KDE aps with another, java/swing aps with their appearence, and now there's Kylix which gives yet another look for it's aplications.
    • The reason why you don't see more Pascal development, at least in Unix world is probably this:

      Pascal n.

      An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada [tuxedo.org] (see also bondage-and-discipline language [tuxedo.org] ). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R [tuxedo.org] fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html [lysator.liu.se].) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

      9. There is no escape

      This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

      People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.

      I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

      Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C [tuxedo.org] ) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.

      (reference) [tuxedo.org] Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.

      • Elevators are nicer and easier than stairs.
        Let's do away with the messy stairs.

        but

        The elevator is broken.
        Use the stairs.
        Can't. No stairs.

      • Hum, I have never seen such restriction with Turbo Pascal. I have wrote TSR program, Multitasked windowed window manager under DOS (with asm subroutine for task switching), Direct hardware access to reconfigure video chips, Mix pascal code with asm code for demo effects like rotozoom, 3D. For BP-Elf, I have developped a process monitoring application who get data from captors on the towers and show results of computations on proprietary display on a VAX computer.

        I have done some C programming during my studies and casting is a pain in the ass. In C some casting could be done in your back by the compiler, in pascal, you need to do it manually and this is less error prone! In C you have casting and functions. Casting as a fonction to change a value from one format to another (eg: flot -> int). Pascal has eliminated the notion of Casting and put a bunch of functions to do the casting work.

        Pascal is my favorite language, if there is less stupid suits who choose languages on the AD size and let Techies and Engineer choose for themself, Pascal/Delphi/Kylix will be in a better situation...

        I think like you say, that your reference is very very old and there is no point to keep it as a reference :-)
      • The reason why you don't see more Pascal development, at least in Unix world is probably this:

        Wow, the close-mindedness of that piece is wonderfully hilarious! I'm getting tired of seeing Kernighan's paper cited. Of *course* the developer of a competing language doesn't like his competition!
        • the close-mindedness of that piece is wonderfully hilarious! I'm getting tired of seeing Kernighan's paper cited. Of *course* the developer of a competing language doesn't like his competition!

          Have you ever read the paper? I read it after learning Pascal in school, and found very true. It's not true of the mile of hacks built on standard Pascal that modern Pascals are, but it's very accurate about standard Pascal, which is torture to program in.
          • Have you ever read the paper? I read it after learning Pascal in school, and found very true. It's not true of the mile of hacks built on standard Pascal that modern Pascals are, but it's very accurate about standard Pascal, which is torture to program in.

            Yes, I've read it many times over the years. The trouble is exactly as you point out: Kernighan is analyzing a pure teaching language as if were somehow supposed to be a systems programming language. When he wrote his rant, Wirth had already developed Modula-2 as a "real world" systems programming version of Pascal. And not surprisingly it addressed Kernighan's problems, but the paper was written after the fact anyway.

            (As an aside, it would have been easy to for Wirth to write a trifling paper criticizing C, but I'm glad he didn't.)

            It doesn't take much to go from pure Pascal to something much more useful, though--certainly not "miles of hacks." All you really need are a few things:

            Separately compiled units. Borland did this with four keywords: unit, uses, interface, implementation. The result is oh so much better than C's hacky header system and FORTRAN-like separate compilation.

            Typecasts. Interestingly enough C++ took the Modula-2 syntax for this.

            A generic pointer type.

            Interestingly, C++ has gone back and taken a number of features from Pascal, such as references (which were just called var parameters in Pascal).

      • Almost all the criticisms offered by Ritchie were about the original Pascal, not the improved object oriented pascal that is used by Delphi. Almost all the looping, escaping, breaking, pointers and other features that a C programmer would expect in C can be done just as well with Delphi (Object Oriented Pascal). Object Oriented Pascal is to Pascal what C++ is to C, though it fixed some of the fundamental shortcomings of the language in the process where C++ did not (and did not need to by and large). The syntax may look different, but it's really very very similar to C and C++ these days. While I personally prefer C's somewhat more terse syntax, I really cannot say I miss much. I've been able to port back and forth without any real difficulty. If you do almost any sort of Windows application development and haven't tried Delphi, then you really are missing out. I would assert that Delphi could replace VC++ for most applications but for its relative lack of critical mass. This makes it relatively undesirable for large scale projects. Where it really makes up for the lack of critical mass, i.e., fewer Delphi programmers, is though its RAD features and components and other advantages (which are less desirable on large ones). It makes it worthwile in many cases for C and C++ programmers to learn Delphi (it's not hard if you come from that background) in smaller shops where rapid turn around time is needed. ...Yeah, it can be a slight pain working directly with the windows (not always/usually necessary) and other C/C++ APIs because it's non-native, but it does work well.
      • Pascal was strict. Borland broke the locks when they produced Turbo Pascal (20 years or so ago). They put in an ABSOLUTE directive that let you make variables share storage, so that you could interpret the same memory in different ways. They put in fast variable length strings. They put in a MOVE intstruction so that you could flop arbitrary bytes around wherever you wanted to. They put in raw access to ports and memory addresses and interrupts and all the low memory data in DOS. With these changes, programmers loved Turbo Pascal, and it sold a many times more copies than anything else for programmers had ever sold.

      • Wow. Since I made my original post, I've been modded down once and had various disagreements posted below. Many of those people may not have read all the way down to the bottom where I said:

        I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.
        That means that, what I was doing was simply posting a piece of "established wisdom". It is my policy to always take anything that's "established wisdom" with a grain of salt. I was simply posting the standard arguement. I was not trying to troll, and I was not trying to start a flame ware. It's just, this person said a certain thing and there's this well-established standard argument against it. So I posted it. I made sure to mention that I wasn't sure if I agreed with it or not.

        The ironic thing is, I feel that, to some extent, all the posters saying Pascal's OK, have convinced me that it isn't OK.

        Everyone saying that Standard Pascal sucked but that Delphi Pascal is great or Object Pascal is great should focus attention here:

        People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.
        And there it is. The only thing that makes it okay is if the extended Pascals are standard enough now. If they're wide-spread enough. Are they? I guess from the arguments and flame-like posts, perhaps they are. I don't know. But is there anything that Pascal can do that other languages can't?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Pascal is good in some areas:

      And bad in others: there's no standard beyond the most basic, and pretty much anything you write will be compiler-specific. Standard Pascal has all the lack of functionality of C without the direct hardware control of C. The Extended Pascal standard is ironically compiler specific - only GPC implements it, to the best of my knowledge.

  • TurboPower: One of the best software companies. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @02:35AM (#5038410) Homepage

    It has been a long time since I have dealt with them, but TurboPower software has been one of the best software companies I have ever seen. They have a history of making sensible decisions about what to program and how to program it.

    I would very much like to have the source code to the free TPE, TurboPowered Editor. This was an excellent DOS editor. There may be Windows versions. If there is only a DOS version, I would plan to make a GUI version. It would be a great start on some HTML processing tools. I would be glad to act as coordinator for a SourceForge entry of the code. I still use the DOS TPE for some text manipulation purposes. Thanks, TurboPower, for the great software.

    I tried to send them email, and got this response: "TurboPower has recently announced its withdrawal from the component library and developer tools market." They seem to be going out of business more completely than the story suggested. I read the story as them going out of the retail business, but I thought that there were wholesale ways of selling their products that they would continue. I guess not.

  • I've Used Several of These (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lucas Membrane ( 524640 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @02:46AM (#5038445)
    They were among the best a decade ago. They put numerous competitors out of business with their high quality, good support, good performance, and fairly decent design. Last I fought with them, not quite so good. They had evidently turned over staff, had expanded product line, and had been somewhat outdone by some competitors. When I called them with a bug report that one of their components was just about worthless, they no longer said that they would fix things ASAP and that a fixed download would be out soon; they said that it's a bug and that I should try one of their other components that provided something similar. So, I'm not surprised that they are giving it up. There is a steady stream of Delphi products coming out of Russia that must make life miserable for anyone in this market in the US. But with Turbo Power's components as a starter and more eyes looking at the code, the Russians might now have serious competition again.
  • Yes, it's 2003 and time to jump on this thing called OPEN SOURCE!
    Seriously, it's very, very later to do this. This is "Open Source as a Waste Disposal Mechanism".
    Few companies dare to use Free/Open Source Software as a development tool, but those that do, and do it well, find it is a very satisfying way of getting software into more hands and making it better. MySQL, Berkeley DB, and there are many other examples.
    For small-to-medium sized software houses there seems little alternative. GPL the damn stuff, and make an alternative license for commercial use. You will get the best of both markets: FOSS developers willing to stress test your work, and commercial developers paying for support.
    There should be a catagory label for this kind of after-the-fact FOSS release: "Deadware", or maybe "FOSS-pit Software".
    • No this is a dead/dying company saying to those who supported their efforts over the years "here have these fruits of our labor". If there is no chance of continued revenue from a large base of well developed code then why not release it into the world? Sure a large amount of the code will never be touched again, but if even a small amount of it goes on to save someone work some day then the entire world has just become a little tiny bit more effecient. When there is no other use for code I think it is great to release it to be free forever more. What is the cost of this "deadware", oh yeah nothing more than the space to save it on some hdd's and the bandwidth to transmit it to anyone that wants it, essentially free.

  • Switching to slot machines? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:31AM (#5038553) Homepage
    TurboPower is owned, the Turbo Power site says, by Aristocrat Technologies [aristocrat.com.au], an Australian maker of slot machines. Aristocrat has a whole line of networked products for casino operation, customer tracking, security, and related functions.

    There's historical precedent for gambling companies pushing the state of the art in computing. Some of the earliest work in commercial computers was funded by American Totalizator, the company that built racetrack betting systems.

    • Trust me, Aristocrat Technologies have plenty of good engineers who specialise in embedded systems (hence we haven't got a shortage of experienced developers). Programming slot machines is like programming game consoles, you need to squeeze as much from the hardware as possible. Although I work on the Australian side of Aristocrat, I've never had to deal with the TurboPower team. Best wishes to all TurboPower employees.
  • I was a Delphi developer for about 4 years and during this time, I have used several TP products and have found them to be very well developed and easy to use.

    I am sad to see them go. I wish all the people involved with TurboPower the very best in whatever venture they get into now.

  • The wages of freedom (Score:5, Informative)

    by willw ( 47430 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @04:17AM (#5038628)
    It seems that - notwithstanding the release of Kylix - not so many people around here are familiar with the Delphi scene. A feature that has distinguished it from its Microsoft competitors is that it is very easy to write good object-oriented components for it. Partly because of this and partly because there is a good 'Delphi scene', for many years there have been large numbers of free Pascal libraries and componenets on the Web. You'll find many of them catalogued on sites like the Polish Delphi Super Page [icm.edu.pl] and the Russian Torry's Delphi Pages [torry.net], as well as the inevitable SourceForge.

    In this environment, all software houses that make Delphi components have struggled to make money. Only the very best have survived - who is going to pay money for a slightly dodgy replacement tree control when the slickest, fastest one available is an Open Source freebie [delphi-gems.com]?

    TurboPower was originally the most innovative of companies, and even if it had lost its way a bit in recent times its passing as a Delphi component vendor is an occasion for regret. You'll find any number of free Delphi libraries for doing serial comms; I suspect that only TurboPower's includes a complete terminal emulator with its own scripting language, and only TurboPower's that includes a fully-fledged fax modem driver complete with all the very tedious stuff to encode and decode Fax TIFF files. All this conscientiously and beautifully documented. There are many other examples of excellence in TurboPower's large range.

    I don't claim there is any reason why all this shouldn't have evolved in an Open Source environment. But AFAIK it hasn't. If the success of Delphi as a tool for Open Source development means that companies such as TurboPower can no longer survive, then I think long term all Delphi (and Kylix) programmers will be much the poorer for it.

    • It seems that - notwithstanding the release of Kylix - not so many people around here are familiar with the Delphi scene.

      Which is rather unfortunate. Delphi kicks the pants off VC++ for Windows development, as far as development time goes. Delphi's compiler puts out optimized code that's as fast, and on some types of operations, faster, than VC++. It's easy to read, easy to maintain, and easy for someone new to pick up on an existing codebase. It's strongly typed, but also provides an easy way to circumvent the type system when necessary. It's got an IDE that makes Visual Studio look clunky and outdated by comparison. And, best of all, it has a compiler for Linux now.

      I don't know what's kept Delphi from gathering more mainstream acceptance. Maybe it's the stigma of slow P-Code that the old UCSD Pascal left the language with, or maybe it's underhanded marketing and business deals by Microsoft (there are many who believe that .NET was originally created by Borland, and was given to Microsoft when MS last invested capital in Borland -- not to mention that the top people Microsoft has working on .NET came from Borland), but it's really a tragedy that Delphi doesn't have more mainstream acceptance.
      • I wouldn't put too much credence in that, since Borldand has been promising a .NET compiler for Delphi ever since .NET was announced and it's not ready yet (it was supposed to be in Delphi 7, instead you get a beta "demo" compiler, with the opportunity to buy it as a seperate product when it's finally released).

        And while the Delphi IDE has some nice features (ctr-shit-c to generate stub code from your object declaration is great), but I wouldn't exactly say it makes VC look clunky and outdated.

  • No Turbo Pascal DOS libaries? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stonehead ( 87327 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @04:40AM (#5038683)
    From the Shutdown FAQ, in my own words: "We feel that most of the other DOS products will not have sufficient demand to successfully support an open-source project."
    Well, Borland already released the Turbo Pascal 5.5 binaries. I have used those to teach children programming on their own DOS boxes. Turbo Power had great library releases for every Turbo Pascal DOS version, wouldn't those be interesting for people who are still working with these?

    I honestly have to admit that - in spite of my fandom for all Turbo Pascal DOS stuff - I have no idea, is GNU Pascal or Free Pascal under Unix any good? I have succesfully got RHIDE working after some compiling hassles, but not really tried it with lots of code. How portable is my old DOS stuff? Can I use FreePascal to let children play with it under Linux in my place, and under DOS at their home?
  • Might this not be the easiest way for submerging companies to quickly divest themselves of any need to support their software. Shut the doors and autoresponr the email.
    We regret to announce that Foobar company has withdrawn from the retail software market. If you are seeking support for one of our former software packages, please consult the following list for contact information regarding the current state of the software.

    Foo 1.1: http://foo.sourceforge.net
    Bar 1.0.1: http://bar.sourceforge.net

    Gracefully exit and leave your customers less unhappy than they otherwise would have been.

  • OSS kills? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Delphi is THE or at last one of the more common tools here in Brazil.

    Today are lots of free and open source libs for Delphi like Project Jedi and RxLIB [sourceforge.net], Torry [torry.ru]

    And Borland has incresling stuffing Delphi with lots of new components in any new version they released.

    Then, looking at they products, I think they do this because for a Delphi developer, makes no more sense to buy components and libs if there are so many freely available.

    For Delphi users, Is this a good or a bad news?

    • It does seem to be a double-edged sword in this case. It's hard to compete with $free. I've been using Delphi as an individual developer for about 8 years (since 1.0 in 16 bit Windows), and I or the companies I've worked for have bought several components over the years, but I've had no need to recently. Free code often means more money in my pocket, but it does seem someone is loosing.
  • So here's the question, for those of us without a big head for licenses... and I'm sure there's more than a few of us out there in this prediciment

    I work on a consulting project that uses Async for Builder that is extremely closed source, i.e. in the code there exists a password routine that would allow one to walk up to any of a certain make of skid steer loader and drive away with it without a key, just by looking at it and with no special tools!!! So, there is a -5% chance of this going OS. There's also dozens of little builder and delphi apps running around that use Async as well.

    If I want to switch to the *NEWEST* Async available when it comes out, does that mean I would have to release the source?

  • Great, but.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tall Rob Mc ( 579885 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @08:36AM (#5039256)
    Of course, we'll all take any announcement of the open-sourcing of useful software as good news. However, I hope a trend doesn't develop where OSS becomes known as "what happens to software when companies die." I'd rather see software open-sourced in a profitable way as opposed to the "we're pulling out of the market so why the hell not" way that is becoming more and more common.
    • However, I hope a trend doesn't develop where OSS becomes known as "what happens to software when companies die."

      I would. Not exclusively, certainly, but it's gotten to where I am reluctant to buy commercial software -- not for RMS-style ideological reasons -- but because the average niche-product software company seems to live no more than two or three years. This is not such a big deal with the major applications I'm dependent on, as Microsoft and Adobe will no doubt continue to bleed me for many years to come, but minor apps from minor companies die off at an alarming rate. I can fill a CD-R or two with all of the specialty graphics apps that I use whose producers are no longer around.

      I'd like to see it become part of commonly accepted ethical business practice to release source code when a product will no longer be upgraded or supported. It's a great way of supporting the customers who supported you when market conditions or business strategy require you to otherwise abandon them.

      So here's to TurboPower for their high standards both coming and going!
      • You make a very good point. I suppose I should have clarified that I don't want popular opinion to only see OSS as what happens to software when companies die. I completely agree with your post, as you bring up an issue that I would truly like to see adopted.

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