[fpc-pascal] OT: Rename for Pascal

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007, Skybuck Flying wrote:

> Well there are some things ofcourse wrong with Free Pascal:

I'm assuming you were being sarcastic or ironic. You can
assume the same when you read this reply.

> 
> 1. First the name:
> 
> "Free"
> 
> Bussiness people don't believe in "Free".

So what ? 
We don't believe in such business people in the first place.

> 
> 2. Free Pascal Quality itself:
> 
> When I see simple things not working like:
> 
> Read or Readln or whatever, I run away screaming from Free Pascal ;) :)

If you see a bug, please file a report. All the rest is FUD.

And be realistic: I asked a C++ programmer how to read a simple string from file.
After 4 hours of looking through the MFC help, he had to admit that he didn't 
know how. And this is NOT a joke, but a real life situation. The guy was payed
more than I was.

> 
> 3. It doesn't have an advanced development environment like Visual Studio 2005
> or Delphi 7 / Delphi 2007 (last one sucky though)
> 
> I have seen onde IDE Lazareus or something like that and it's a clone of
> Delphi 7 but it doesn't have the quality yet :)

Well. Delphi 7 crashes every second debug run in my day-time job.
Lazarus still has to crash on me.

Please provide REAL arguments, REAL missing features. All the rest is FUD.

Use Lazarus for a month daily, to develop a real program, and then come back. 
People who have used lazarus for about 1 hour and then tell us 
'this and that feature is not working'
just do not have any right of voice. Lazarus has quite a lot of options
which Delphi does not have, and vice versa. You must go through a learning
curve, like with any other product.

You can't judge a book by looking at its cover.

> 
> 4. Pascal sounds oooooldddddddddd and reminds people of the 16 bit dos/days.
> Yak ! Full of frustration, limitations, and code going into the waste basket 
> ;) :)

Only for stupid programmers. We are not interested in people who look only
to the package or the surface. They are hype-sensitive and will disappear 
as soon as the next hype comes along. 

> 
> 5. Special features for Free Pascal, what does it offer that the other tools
> do not ?

The question is not what it has to offer more: the question is what the other
tools offer more. The answer is: Nothing whatsoever. At most, they save some
typing using some obscure language features. So what ? Use code templates in
your favourite IDE, and you'll have to type even less.

Pascal is a decent language, just like any other. Why would we need to defend it ?
We prove daily that it 'just works'.

> 
> I know free pascal can cross compile but for now I only need to compile for
> Windows 32 bit and maybe Windows 64 bit in the future ;)
> 
> What features does free pascal offer for Win32 or Win64 development which
> other environments do not ?

For a start: it works; Just start Lazarus. You mentioned Delphi: it does not work.

If you see a business person, do not spread FUD, give real arguments.

I converted my company from a VB company to a Delphi company. 
I just used Delphi, and simply showed to them that I could do 
the work better, cleaner and faster than they did in the past. 

Any business man should be sensitive to that: time is money.

Michael.