[fpc-pascal]How to use Linux libraries?

[Rainer Hantsch]

Hello, James!

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, James Mills wrote:
| I could write you up a set of such procedures or classes to do this,
| however I'm starting back at uni. New semester :)

Good success at Uni! What are you studying?


| Anyway, I'm sure there are others here on this mailing list that could
| do the same.
Possibly, yes. But you are the _first_ one who answered, so the number of
people still seems to be very small... ;-)


| Question: Why can't you do it yourself ? It isn't that hard to grab the
| specs of the JPEG image format and learn it and write your own data
| structures to contain the jpeg image data, decode it into pixel arrays...
| It's all there in the specs :)

Something about me: I started programming in Pascal roughly 15 years ago, on
CP/M (Z80 CPU, 4MB RAM, 10MB HDD,...), later I changed to DOS with finally
Borland Pascal, but I kept consequently away from Windoze programming.
Finally I changed to Linux, which is more what I like DOS, than Windoze...

But all this years I never wrote one line in assembly language, nor was there
any need for me to include external code. I did everything in plain Pascal
language, without any hacking and tweaking, which was perfect for writing all
this userspecific software.

So my primary problem is that I never got experience about how to solve such
things like linking to external libraries. Of course, I could sit down and
hope to find it out by myself with trial & error, but this is extremely
inefficient and time consuming. Also success will be very low in this case.
Another thing is: Why should I start re-inventing the wheel and writing my own
JPEG/TIFF/.../units from scratch, when there exist a lot of ready made
libraries? Isn't it the purpose of libraries to do exactly this?


So I am looking for some help in form of _working_ samples which I can analyze
and try to understand. It will also be very helpful if there would be somebody
who could "teach" me a little bit and guide me to my first success.



mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch