[fpc-other] Other IDEs

[Paul Robinson]

Long time reader, first time poster, or else I haven't posted in a long time.

Richard Ward, among others, talks about the possibility of some other IDEs for use with FPC, perhaps something written in Pascal such that it could be used as a teaching tool.

If you want to teach how to write an IDE or understand how one is written, that might be a laudable goal.  But I think that for people who would want to use Pascal professionally, we need something better.  I think Lazarus was a nice idea, if it had come out when Turbo Pascal 5.5 was around, as that is basically of which it is a clone, or a workalike if you want to be more charitable.

The IDE such as Delphi provides is fairly good, and unless you're going to be developing for text environments it is the way to go.  And the IDE such as what was provided by Visual Basic is even better than the one for Delphi because it gave a much better environment for doing on-the-fly development.  Anyone who dismisses what Visual Basic was as a toy never used it in version 6 or in .NET as it can be used for professional development.

But I think if all we want is a language to teach programming then we're not going to get much attention or interest from professional developers.  As soon as someone goes through the language and the tools, and finds that they can't get certain professional development done, they're going to move on to something else.

My thought is, if we want people to consider FPC as a serious, professional-class application, it needs to interface to a serious, professional-class IDE and use as much of the provided features as is available.  And as I see it, that means that FPC should be able to be used with Eclipse.

As I've been busy with other things and haven't had a chance to use either lately, I haven't had a chance to check; if it already does so, please excuse me.  But I suspect this conversation would not be taking place if it was runnable full-featured under Eclipse.  Probably a lot of very unsexy and tedious work, thus it hasn't been done.

I believe Eclipse provides a lot of nice features including identifier lookup and run-time tracing and variable examination.  These sort of things should be available, or if they are not present the capability of having them should be present.  I've been busy so I haven't looked at FPC much lately but I'm thinking about it more now.  But there are things that need to be done if they're not already.  Better debugging support so that applications which are not production can get better "while running" analysis including real-time monitoring and control of execution, variable values and code paths.  I know some of this might not be significant for some people but it will be to others.

I could probably say more but I think I'm still on point and so I'll stop here rather than go on and bore people, although I might already have done so. :)

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Paul Robinson <paul at paul-robinson.us> http://paul-robinson.us (My Website)
"Above all else... We shall go on..." _"...And continue!"_
"The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that no one learns the lessons that history teaches us."