[fpc-devel] On recasting BORLAND PASCAL FROM SQUARE ONE for Free Pascal

[Michael Schnell]

While this of course is a good idea (and decent comments were presented 
by others), ...

Why not (based on the text you have) write a real (commercial) book on 
Lazarus.

Lazarus is approaching a non-beta state and is available for many 
platforms.

Some days ago I used Lazarus to cross-compile a (testing-) application 
that I loaded on a GloFish cell-phone. The only effort was to unzip the 
additional (ARM-) compiler and (WinCE-) libraries from a single Zip 
file, select the appropriate Target-CPU and Target OS in a GUI menu and 
press F9. Now I could upload the resulting exe file to the GloFish and 
it showed the Form; and pressing the buttons worked like intended.

I think that's really impressing and to me using Delphi with .NET (if 
possible at all) does not seem more attractive.

Moreover you can install Lazarus on Windows, Linux or Mac and use the 
same source code to create your applications for the appropriate 
platform. (Of course you can create GUI programs, command-line-tools, 
dlls, and even CGI-applications to be used with Apache.)

The usability of Lazarus for the development of many (or most of that 
class of ) hobby- and commercial products is slowly reaching the level 
of Delphi's, (as with most community projects) the documentation is 
always a problem.

This is why IMHO a decent book on Lazarus is really due and should find 
a decent count of customers.

I'm sure here and in the Lazarus forums, you will find any support you 
might request.

-Michael