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looking for a free basic compiler

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I agree. For a seasoned programmer language choice is less important then people who are learning. In isolation I would much rather teach people to program in Pascal. But all the people I teach are doing embedded work so C is by far the better choice.

For PC development I like C#.

Like I said, I was being silly. As far as I am concerned, either you can program or you can't--the language should be a minor hump to get over.

Well, mostly. I wouldn't through a procedural or object-oriented programmer at a functional programming language problem and expect them to swim immediately. But within language families, programming is pretty much programming and the syntax is a small thing.


Torben
 
I suspect it's down to the debugging support, and if you disabled all debugging C would be at least as small as Pascal.

If I am not mistaken, the reason is the difference in how libraries are linked in. TP code could also contain all the information needed for a debugger (the IDE contained one too) and a C program, even after stripping the debugging support, is typically still larger. TP included a smart linker which would just include the functions and procedures which were actually used in the program; C compilers just through the whole library in there if it's linked.

I'm not sure how much this is mitigated by dynamic linking. I was using static linking for my programs back then.

I did Forth a long time back as well, it never impressed me very much at all.

It would be pretty pointless in this day and age to shift from C to Pascal, Pascal may be a far 'better' language, and forces good programming practice on you - but C has effectively beaten it off :D

Never tried Forth myself. Heard things both good and bad (like with any language). Going back to Pascal wholesale would be fairly silly at this point, yeah. C is just too ubiquitous.


Torben
 
Other things advanced programmers need to watch for are things like re-entrant and recursive ability. 'Decent' in-lining of functions etc.

TP had all that good stuff implemented well, if I remember correctly. At least I used to write all my TSRs for DOS/Win3.x in TP and I used a lot of interrupt code and inline assembler.


Torben
 
TP had all that good stuff implemented well, if I remember correctly. At least I used to write all my TSRs for DOS/Win3.x in TP and I used a lot of interrupt code and inline assembler.

TP was really great, I wrote a LOT of stuff using it - I also converted a lot of C programs to Turbo Pascal as well.
 
I agree, TP was a little marvel in its days. pointers, linked lists, objects were quite fun with tp also.
 
Yes I think you're right, it may still be possible to download it for free, it was at one time.

After doing a little research I remembered getting a magazine years ago with Kylix on the CD and checking it out. (Linux Format, maybe?) I wasn't that impressed at the time.

It seems that nobody was really all that impressed with Kylix, and it's been abandoned since ~2002 or so. However, there is an active community around Lazarus, which is a Delphi clone which both runs on and targets several windowing systems including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. I've been playing around with it a bit and it so far seems quite nifty as a cross-platform RAD tool.

Sadly, it doesn't target PIC, AVR, or other µcs, from what I've seen. Just trying to drift back toward the thread topic a bit here. ;)


Torben
 
I have an original Delphi7, so I'll stick with that.

I'm busy going through PMP for PIC, it can look like TP or you can set it to look like Delphi.
It does not seem that bad, but I'm still in the middle of the doc. There are some commands not standard to TP or Delphi, suppose you can trip on them a bit, but otherwise it's quite true to TP and Delphi.

It could probably be the best free compiler for PIC mcu's, but at this point only supports the 16F's etc. Not the more powerful 18F's.
That would put some people off.
 
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