RayW,

Mike is going to kick us off his forum if this goes too far, but ...

Very early on I programmed in basic on a CPM machine.  Then I discovered Phillippe Kahn's Turbo pascal.  I thought it was wonderful, especially compared with basic!  I did home programming in pascal on DOS and Windows up until the advent of object pascal.  I also did home programming on Borland C.

Kahn's products have always impressed me.  Interestingly, I am now using a GPS navigation app on my iPad called MotionX Drive GPS which is a Phillippe Kahn product.  It is very good and I now use my iPad as my primary GPS navigator, supplanting my Garmin.

Essentially all of my programming at work was in Fortran, primarily simulation of dynamic systems in the aerospace industry.

As for punched cards, when I started Fortran programming everything was on boxes of cards.  We got our output on a big stack of paper and then plotted results by hand on graph paper.  Those were the days!!

Cheers,

Jim H.

In the next version, I'll probably just put a "rt click = calculate" in the tool tip.  Then when you right click, a box pops up that has two entries: one for the specified length and one for the actual printed length.  Then not only do you have an easy way to calculate, but it also shows you how it's done.

As for programming languages, Fortran is actually the only one I've never used.  I used assembly language to write games in the early 80's and switched to Turbo Pascal in the later 80's as it was the fastest compiler by far and not a whole lot slower than assembly language when actually compiled.  Then I switched to C and used that for a few years when Pascal fell off the radar.  After a few years of C with its curly brackets, == signs, and pointers-to-pointers-to-pointers where you could never seem to really just reference a variable, I realized I was a lot more efficient in Pascal.  C just hurt my head, trying to look at a screen full of nothing but symbols... looked a lot more like the matrix than code.  It was efficient in the written code --> machine code arena but highly inefficient in the design arena, with no well thought out IDE.  Then Delphi came along and I never looked back.  Not only could I design and program 10x faster than in C, I could develop faster than just about any C programmer.  Even better, the compiled code was just as efficient and in many cases, more efficient than what I was writing in C because the compiler was so refined that it optimized everything whereas in C, you had to be really careful and use a lot of tricks to get the same efficiency.

Now, with Delphi up to its 12th edition and supporting Unicode, 64 bit, cross-platform, it's here to stay.  It's definitely the most advanced tool available for RAD (rapid application development).  It's the reason that one developer can bring you Qimage.

Mike

Hi Jim.

going from linear to object oriented, I was lucky to be 'mentored' by a guy from IBM. The solution is easy, as he explained to me -'You unplug your brain, and then plug it in again, but sideways'. It's one of those things that takes a year of frustration, and then it suddenly clicks, and you can't then even think about doing it in the old way.

Best wishes,

Ray