[fpc-other] Re:Pascal Showcase Project/Education

[Tomas Hajny]

On Thu, December 11, 2008 10:37, Michael Fuchs wrote:
> Mark J. Wood schrieb:
>> It would be good if there was a version of
>> an ObjectPascal that was packaged to meet that need, as you say. I often
>> teach in TP, but it's such a dinosaur. It would be good to have a
>> bridging step.
>
> But if you teach in TP you can easily switch to Freepascal and use the
> textmode IDE. I would use it too, but I want a GTK/Win32 solution. Is
> there a chance to easily convert the ide? I presume it is made with Free
> Vision, FV programs converted to LCL?

Well, it would be certainly possible to migrate ("convert") the text mode
IDE environment to GTK/Win32, possibly to LCL even (the LCL path would be
probably slightly more difficult, I suspect, but obviously with the
advantage of having support for more targets at the end), by different
implementation of units video (and possibly units mouse and even keyboard
as well) based on the particular interfaces/libraries. However, the main
question would be the expected benefits, because it would still behave the
same way, just not running within a console any longer but in a GUI window
instead (more or less everything would still look the same way it does
today).

The other option would be rewriting the whole IDE in (e.g.) LCL from
scratch (i.e. re-implementing the same functionality, but not re-using the
old code most of the time), but that's something completely different
(still doable most probably, but with much higher effort). If you go this
route, you end up with a completely different codebase which needs to be
maintained independently. Even in that case, the advantages are still not
completely clear to me (as long as you mostly want to keep the same
functionality and behaviour), though - it would just look somewhat nicer
and smoother, but that would be it. If you want a different functionality,
it's a different topic, of course, but than it isn't related to the old FP
IDE any longer, I guess.

Tomas