At 07/25/2002 09:03 PM (Thursday), desdinova@soupforare.net wrote:
I'm trying to teach myself pascal. What with the new release of Freepascal, and what with Delphi6/Kylix being out, I figure I should get something done while I'm out pounding pavement. Anyone know of any used book stores that have a decent computer section?
The Micro Center book section (in Cambridge) has probably the best selection. Still not good, though, for Pascal books. Be aware that the historical Pascal you may have been exposed to as a student in the past has changed considerably over the years. Borland has "owned" Pascal for over a decade and defined more extensions than there were original language constructs. The current "Delphi Pascal" is far closer to C++ than any other single language and is as completely object oriented as C++ is. This is the "Pascal" of Kylix and is a truly useful language since it retains much of the useful type-safe, single pass attributes of the original Pascal effort. Even with the rich features now available you will not find a faster compile-test-fix-compile cycle anywhere for a fully compiled language. All the other current open source efforts are trying for compatibility with this de facto standard. Therefore, if you find a book on Kylix you should do well learning about the whole group.