As a followup to the TIOBE & Pascal micro saga, thanks to David Champion, DWScript programming is now a (very) small part of the TIOBE TPCI stats, and Oxygene became its own language at position #163.
Here is an excerpt from the TIOBE update for July 2013
(more…)
A couple days ago, a Pascal game compiled with SmartMobileStudio was accepted on the FireFox MarketPlace as a packaged app.
It had only been tested on the FireFox OS desktop simulator, how would it hold its own on a real device?
We’re not talking of flagship phones with quad-cores like a Galaxy, a Nexus 4 or an iPhone, but mainstream, single-core, sub-$100 hardware…
Worst thing in popularity is not being considered, or found.
Looks like TIOBE is not alone in differentiating Delphi and Pascal, other popularity indexes share the same issue:
More indexes I looked at didn’t show the “runners up”, only the top 5 or top 10, but they may as well have differentiated.
For lang-index, merging Pascal (rank 11) and Delphi (24), would be enough to reach rank 10, ahead of Ruby, just shy of Perl.
For some unfathomable reason, the TIOBE index distinguishes between “Pascal” and “Object Pascal”, and the “Pascal” category is seeing growth:
So it can’t be the old classic procedural Pascal, can it? That leaves only Object Pascal dialects (FreePascal the largest, but also Oxygene and SmartPascal/DWScript). Pascal programming isn’t dead or dying.
The second Smart Context 2013 has been announced! As with the previous round, first prize is a tablet device of your own choice (up to USD 750). This time the theme is “Game Development”
This is a belated followup to the L-System Fiddle series from last year (more like a forgotten article), which ended with a Pascal-based HTML5 app being used to generate fractals and publish them to imgur.
Object Pascal does allow binding a property to a field for direct read/writer, but we all have seen properties that required a slightly more complex getter or setter, and that usually meant a method for both. DWScript (svn trunk) & Smart Pascal (1.1) now support property expressions and statements, so the syntax is extended to allow:
property Name : Type read (expression) write (expression|statement)
Under the hood, the compiler will generate an unnamed getter or setter method when appropriate.
(more…)
..and maybe win first prize, which is the tablet of your choice?
This is the first competition out of four this year. So this is your chance to win some exciting prices by showing off your Object Pascal skills!
The topic of this round is: graphics programming (eg. demo-scene, fractal art, visualizations etc).
Registration is before the 10th of February, follow the link above for more details!
After having survived the Mayan apocalypse and just before the year ends, and the US economy falls from the fiscal cliff into the pit of recession, here is a quick look at thirteen features of DWScript, so you don’t come into 2013 unaware 🙂
A while ago I asked about the name of TObject ancestor, well, it’s now live in the SVN and its name is ‘Object‘.
Object is thus the new root class, above TObject. Eventually, it’ll be the ancestor for every other type.