Acmlm's Board - I2 Archive - Programming - What is Delphi?
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Teundusia
Posts: 49/760 |
But are there any free compilers I can download? and any good tutorials I can find? |
Kagerato
Posts: 22/25 |
Delphi is a development environment created by Borland. It uses Borland's GUI toolkit (VCL/VCL.NET) and Object Pascal.
If you were to compare Delphi 6 with Visual Basic 6, I believe you'd agree with me that Delphi is superior in many aspects.
However, Windows development has changed quite a bit in recent years. The last version of Delphi to support win32 (through standard VCL) development was 7. Delphi 8 is designed to build programs for the .NET platform.
Likewise, Visual Basic has changed enormously as well.
Delphi 6 or 7 is a pretty decent place to start programming. You'll get virtually all the benefits of RAD (rapid application development) without most of the flaws generally associated with it. Object Pascal is as much a object-oriented language as C++ is. Pascal traditionally has been rather similar to C, and Object Pascal is not an exception.
Delphi has an excellent debugger; on par with Visual Studio (though Microsoft generally finds some way to edge out minor advantages).
Beware of one thing if you're developing with Delphi 6/7: executables are normally statically linked with the VCL. The Visual Component Library is a huge base of code and will bloat your executable to pretty much all hell. A basic program is over 400 kbyte. The executable will compress by about 50% using standard ZIP, though.
You can build with "runtime" packages, also known as dynamic linking, but then you'll have to distribute (and install) the libraries seperately.
Fortunately, executable size isn't related to speed of execution. Code that isn't run can't slow anything down.
Executable size isn't generally as important as it used to be, since broadband is still steadily growing among home users. |
dan
Posts: 174/782 |
Technically, Delphi uses Object Pascal, which is an object orientated version of Pascal.
Delphi is like Visual Basic, but with Pascal, and much better language features.  |
Jesper
Posts: 911/2390 |
Nope. Pascal is the language. Delphi is the programming environment, and perhaps the dialectal changes of Pascal. |
Dylan
Posts: 911/1407 |
Well, its a language for programming applications, find out more here. Some programs for rom manipulation have been written in Delphi... personally, I've never tried it. |
Teundusia
Posts: 46/760 |
What is Delphi? I heard others talking about it in really old posts, but I don't get what it is |
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