Any Delphi experience here?

[Moose423956]

Has anyone here got Delphi experience? I've got a few questions I need to get answers to.

Cheers
Moose

[AtW]

Get Visual Studio C# dude

[DimPrawn]

Delphi.

I never understood why Delphi became popular?

VB was less powerful but much easier and C++ was more elegant, more powerful and more mainstream. A real technology dead-end.

Sorry I can't help.

[Moose423956]

It needs to be Delphi I'm afraid.

We've got an application written in Delphi, but it hasn't been changed in yonks, so the development environment has disappeared. Now we've got a requirement to change it, which I have to estimate, and I have zero experience of Delphi.

I need to know how long it takes to set up a development environment from scratch, also what source files are called (the .extension), and how easy it is to change the code. I can probably equate it to online mainframe programs for estimating amount of work to do, because I have nothing to compare it with.

So....HELP!

[JailBreak]

I seem to remember that the source code file will be .pas apart from that I cant remember anything about delphi!!!!

[VectraMan]

I never understood why Delphi became popular?

Only because of it's not-Microsoft'ness IMO.

Pascal wasn't it?

[Moose423956]

Only because of it's not-Microsoft'ness IMO.

Pascal wasn't it?

I believe the underlying code is Pascal, but it has a VB style front end. But I don't really know.

[AtW]

Delphi.

I never understood why Delphi became popular?

Simple - Delphi was generating code that was much faster than VB's interpretation, yet it had visual features, like click on a button and write code for that action - Visual C++ did not have it back them, it was PITA to code so did not even use it until Visual Studio 2002 appeared.

Pascal was designed for academia to teach students, not write real stuff with it - not very helpful, eh? That's because you picked a dead end product

[DimPrawn]

Simple - Delphi was generating code that was much faster than VB's interpretation, yet it had visual features, like click on a button and write code for that action - Visual C++ did not have it back them, it was PITA to code so did not even use it until Visual Studio 2002 appeared.

Pascal was designed for academia to teach students, not write real stuff with it - not very helpful, eh? That's because you picked a dead end product

If I'm clicking a button, does it matter if it takes 0.001 or 0.01 seconds to process?

If I want ultimate performance on a server-side product, why would I want a pointy-clicky thing?


Good luck if you don't know delphi and the underlying PASCAL language. It's not any easy thing to pickup in 5 minutes.

[swamp]

I wrote some Delphi years ago. It was a competitor to VB for creating windows forms applications. In many ways it was superior to VB: decent underlying language (Turbo Pascal) with (reasonable) support for OO constructs/inheritence etc, good exception handling, good performance, lightweight client install options.

Delphi was doomed as soon as client-side winform apps were replaced by server-mounted web apps. Microsoft were able to keep VB alive with ASP, but Borland probably didn't bother. Shame really as Turbo Pascal was quite good, but you wouldn't choose it over Java.