[fpc-pascal]Extremely disappointed..

[Alan Grimes]

I was greatly saddened when I read in one of the manuals that the
overlay feature had been removed... I am a horribly inexperienced
programmer so maybe there is a better way of doing what I wanted to do
and I'm just being stupid and doing things in the wrong way (as usual.)


The project is an AI testbench program. I will need to do my very first
serious graphics programming (!!!) and do a number of things I don't
know how to accomplish in a reasonably managable way... 


The software design that I have come up with so far is this: 

the user types 

c:\AI\> testbench simon.ai 

and the testbench program loads..

Then, the program looks for the "simon.ai file" and loads that AI,
providing key IO functions to simon and a number of other hooks. It will
then switch to executing the main loop of the AI and only respond to
either user or AI input. 

In addition to this, other modules such as "chessbrd.ovl" and stuff
could be swapped in and out to provide test programs for the AI to work
with entirely within the testbench.exe program. 

I call this style "system oriented design". It seems to me to be the
most elegant way of orgainizing my source.. I had designed an entire OS
around the paradigm but was unable to implement it... Here I hope to get
some experience with using it on a real application. -- the first that I
have been really motovated to write ever!!! 

Please tell me what I am doing wrong and what features of FreePascal I
should be looking at. =)

-- 
Linux has more source code than my brain.
http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/