-=> mark lewis wrote to Tony Langdon <=-

 ml> yeah, screw videos... ummm... the FPC guys will say that most Delphi
 ml> related books are ok... some few things might be different but for the
 ml> most part, they're ""the same""... also, one of the guys on either the
 ml> FPC or Lazarus teams wrote a book which is available but i don't know
 ml> where or for how much... i pull the three FPC and Lazarus related
 ml> mailing lists... there's also a forum but i can't stand its
 ml> interface... the mailing list works great for me and that's where i get
 ml> most of my help when i need it...

Ahh, OK.  Seems we work in similar ways.  Mailing lists are good.  Yeah, forums
suck, and mostly due to interface and network lag issues.  A real retrograde
step in my opinion - BBSs do standalone messaging systems so much more
efficiently.  I'll have to check out the lists.

 ml> Lazarus is a RAD environment but it is also a good editor environment,
 ml> too... help is available from within the editor just like in the TP/BP
 ml> days... i still do a lot of procedural coding with some little bits of
 ml> OOP stuffs... i haven't done anything at all with Lazarus' RAD
 ml> capabilities other than a few experimental things from some document or
 ml> other i found...

Dabbling with Lazarus, it felt a bit TP like, brought back some old memories.
  Looks like it's worth a bit of time playing.  I've dabbled in a little OOP,
mostly Java several years ago, when I was working on a project that used Java
libraries, otherwise my coding has been procedural too.

 ml> as an aside, i'm looking for mark may's mksrcmsg libraries converted to
 ml> FPC... i'm not looking very hard but i do have several projects that
 ml> would really benefit from being recompiled with the updated code and
 ml> being 32bit or 64bit instead of 16bit... if you don't remember mark's
 ml> code, it is the OOP library for accessing JAM, MSG, SQUish, HMB and old
 ml> EZYcom message bases... i think there's also some QWK stuff available
 ml> but that's probably in the sources he released of his Mythical Kingdom
 ml> BBS package...

Not familiar with those, but they sound rather interesting.  I saw very little
source in the heyday of my BBSing, unfortunately.   My BBSing days were also
not long after the point in time when I decided to stay away from programming,
other than for uni assignments and the occasional small project.  One of my
last of those small projects was a Morse code tutor (because in those days, I
had no other way to obtain one!), which I later ported to run on the Microbee
(an Australian Z80 CP/M machine).  All of the code, excepr for the timing and
sound routines ported fine into TP on CP/M.  I had to work with a friend to
write custom functions to replace the inbuilt ones in the DOS version of TP. 
Those functions were written in assembler, and getting the timing loops right
was an interesting exercise. 


... Buy only cured hams, the sick ones are not good for you.
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