BL> Every time I see Frank's work, I'm tempted to rush out and buy
 BL> Pascali but the $400 keeps stopping me. Actually, VB is pretty
 BL> slick.

 BV> Hmmm...I got the "junk fax" for Delphi this weekend. Delphi is
 BV> the Turbo Pascal equivalent of VB and it is supposed to be a
 BV> ball-tearer. It claims to have all the nice parts of VB and it
 BV> compiles to native code which screams. It could be worth a
 BV> look, especially as some of the fastest and smoothest Windoze
 BV> programs I have seen have turned out to be Turbo-Pascal
 BV> creations. Delphi will initially have an RRP of $350 for the CD
 BV> version. Upgrades from TP will RRP at $280

  As soon as I saw VB, I knew that it would cause a revolution in
programming. It is *too* nice. I rate it the best M$ program I have
ever used, and that includes Word. I guess that Delphi is Borland's
first attempt at doing a proper compiler, since Turbo Pascal. It'll
need to be good to top VB.

  My only experience of Borland is C++ 3, and it is a heap of shit. It
is so bad I keep thinking I am doing something wrong. I keep saying,
this can't be right!

  From my point of view, I judge a program on how easy it is to use,
and how it gets me where I want to go. I rate Word at 7/10. Borland
C++ rates 2/10. VB rates 9/10. This is not the C language, which I
find easier to understand and use than VB - it's the fucking compiler!
And the interface. And everything else! It sucks.

  I still can't believe that when I want to run a C program, I have to
wait 20-seconds while the bloody thing recompiles and links something
I've only added a comma to! VB does it in a flash! They have two
compilers: one for the final .exe that takes 20 seconds, and a
run-time compiler that is instantaneous. VB is so good that even M$
couldn't fuck it up (although they try hard).

  It seems to me that programmers get carried away with shaving size
and speed off their compiled exe when it really means fuck all. By
the time you've written your program, the PC is twice as fast anyway.
The test we did with keno was very educational. Frank actually did it
better in Pascal (and ASM) than Paul in C.... with VB 1/4 as fast...
but I shaved 20x off VB by writing it right, and your KrazyKeno was
the one everyone liked - low speed and all.

  My VB pkt2qwk is four-times faster than Paul's C version, and it
joins and twits too, as well as doing everything in your batch file. 
The real secret is in the code - not the bloody compiler. I am
suspicious that Delphi "really flies". Is it easy to use, and does the
GUI make sense? Can you run a change inside one-second?

 BV> There aint much margin in anything nowadays but the dealer
 BV> price will shave a few bucks off, if anyone is interested. Hey
 BV> Frank, how many TP disks do you have ? The RRP will increase in
 BV> 90 days to be $795 

  I am certainly interested - if only to shaft Microsoft for naming
something BOB, and if Delphi writes faster assembler and lets me write
ASM in line, and has a better set of functions than VB's simple-minded
lot, then $300 would not be too much to pay. $800 is a joke! ROFL!!

 BL> I haven't looked at using DLLs yet, but I suspect that this
 BL> will let it do any bloody thing at all, if I ever get around to
 BL> it.

 BV> It isn't hard at all. All you need to do is to prototype the
 BV> Function in the declaration section of GLOBAL.BAS, then you can
 BV> call it just like any other function.

  Yair... it's just I haven't got around to it yet.

  My attitude is changing. At first I planned to learn programming
tricks in VB because it was nice, and then change "up" to C. I am
beginning to wonder if there is any need to change up at all; that VB
(or something similar like Delphi) might be an end in itself. I keep
discovering that everything is shit easy. At every new step, I suffer
"is this all there is?" syndrome.

  I meant to keep going, until I could work out a program and write it 
right first time. I can do that now, but I find myself reluctant to
leave VB that works perfectly well anyway, and seems to be able to do
anything I can think of. Maybe Delphi is the way to go...

Regards,
Bob
 
    
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