[fpc-pascal] Re: OT a bit - Planet Object Pascal

[Reinier Olislagers]

On 17-2-2013 14:52, Sven Barth wrote:
> On 17.02.2013 14:40, Frank Church wrote:
>> On 17 February 2013 09:35, Florian Klämpfl
>> <florian-y8GAwIkqPAJpn7uciFS/BA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>> Am 17.02.2013 09:55, schrieb ik:
>>>> On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Florian Klämpfl
>>>> <florian-y8GAwIkqPAJpn7uciFS/BA at public.gmane.org
>>>> <mailto:florian-y8GAwIkqPAJpn7uciFS/BA at public.gmane.org>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> When I hear stuff like "sure pascal is cool but lack of good string
>>>> support", I think that it is more self explanatory then anything.
>>>>
>>>> At the local open source community I'm a known evangelist for Object
>>>> Pascal, and my blog is full of code, text etc, regarding stuff in
>>>> object
>>>> pascal.
>>>> Some of the people over here that actually started using FPC/Lazarus
>>>> arrived due to my blog posts, so spreading the word is very
>>>> important imho.
>>>
>>> It is. But some might code, others might evangelize. What I wanted to
>>> say: those who are interested what happens in FPC in detail might follow
>>> also the svn rss feed. There is simply no need for the developers to
>>> blog about this.
>>
>> To be fair to Michael and Florian, the compiler i.e. FPC is not  the
>> same as the IDE Lazarus, which is the hub for most of the activity, so
>> one can understand their outlook, but a bit of info from the leading
>> lights of FPC every now and then would be appreciated :)
<snip remark about Lazarus>
> It might not be related to Lazarus, but because of this I've started to
> write feature announcements for new and big changes (generic
> constraints, TThread extension, type helpers) so that users can see what
> new features were added to the compiler/the class libraries so that they
> can test them (and hopefully report bugs they find). Also I'm trying to
> give potential future developments so that they can see in what ways a
> feature could be improved.

Thanks, Sven, for writing these feature announcements. For me, they
help in letting me know what's going on.

I agree with a lot of the remarks about documentation in this thread. I
suspect that having some easy tool to edit fpdoc documentation and
directly show the results would be useful.
After producing some documentation with it, I've given up on fpdoc as
too unwieldy. I suspect many have or haven't even tried.
Having a tool in place (e.g. a web frontend, or an improved LazDE) that
allows easier editing of fpdoc documentation would help a lot.
This may help get more info into fpdoc instead of the wiki, the forum,
the mailing list...