PC Programming Language

Hi All,

I am looking for suggestions on free or low cost complier programs for the PC.... I have some experince with VB6.... however I would like to examine other languages and software packages.

My main programming goal is write programs for Windows XP and serial coms interfacing with minimal or no database requirements.

I welcome your suggestions.

Regards Joe

Reply to
Joe G (Home)
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Python.

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Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  .. If I cover this
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Reply to
Grant Edwards

Microsoft Visual C# Express Edition. Starting with the 2005 version, serial port interfacing is included.

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Borland is about to bring out "Turbo" versions of Delphi and C# which will be available, with some limitations, as free downloads.

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Python, as someone mentioned, is popular with beginning programmers and is what the computational linguistics community has more or less settled on because it's so good at string handling. Personally, though, I'm not too fond of it. I'd rather use something that was designed, from the ground up, to be a professional programming tool for the target machine (the PC).

Reply to
mc

apart from the other free languages/compilers available on the net

you can download from microsoft site the visual studio 2005 suite in express version ( vb.net c++ and c# )

it's a somewhat reduced version of the standard edition , it's free and you even sell the programs you make.

Reply to
mmm

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I think a bit more basic that the other suggestions, but worth a mention:

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Regards, Richard.

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for Cortex-M3, ARM7, ARM9, HCS12, H8S, MSP430 Microblaze, Coldfire, AVR, x86, 8051 & PIC18 * * * *

Reply to
FreeRTOS.org

here is one good place to look:

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There have been any number of serial comm I/O packages compiled as DLLs. You might want to look to see if any of these will do what you need.

Joe

Reply to
Joseph Power

gcc and cygwin.

pete

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pete@fenelon.com "I once coaxed a dog into a library" - Tommy Saxondale
Reply to
Pete Fenelon

Why not program Windows with native Windows tools, for goodness' sake?

(UNIX -- the hot new operating system of 28 years ago!)

Reply to
mc

I'm impressed ! ( and the words 'Inprise' and 'Enterprise' never appear... ! )

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

I trust gcc and cygwin. I don't trust the M$ tools to anything like the same degree. Borland's aren't bad, and might be worth a punt now the free 'Turbo' stuff is coming back out again.

Or if you want a free 'native' compiler, there's always OpenWatcom. I just named the tools *I* would use if I had to develop a non-GUI Win32 application.

pete

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pete@fenelon.com "I once coaxed a dog into a library" - Tommy Saxondale
Reply to
Pete Fenelon

Those are just your feelings. Surely adding cygwin adds an extra layer of potential unreliability to Windows.

If you must have a UNIX environment, then instead of Windows plus cygwin, just run Linux. It doesn't make a lot of sense to use an operating system merely to emulate some other operating system.

I thought the original poster might have wanted to develop Windows applications, since his question was about Windows.

Reply to
mc

Surely this deserves a reply and I trust others will jump in as well; gcc on cygwin _does_ provide a development environment for Windows apps; if it weren't for that toolchain, I could not have built a G.729 codec for a Win2k voip softphone not long ago. One may build apps using cygwin's APIs or native Windows APIs -- even mingw is supported.

Cygwin doesn't add any 'layer of unreliability' to Windows; MS has that already cornered; it is just a dll and supporting tools, not some virtualizing environment.

Regards,

Michael Grigoni Cybertheque Museum

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msg

;)

Steve

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Reply to
Steve at fivetrees

Thanks all for you speedy replies.

Any comments on freepascal?

Joe

Reply to
Joe G (Home)

In article , Joe G (Home) writes

Use Delphi

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Reply to
Chris Hills

Hi Chirs,

Can you eloborate why... Delphi over freepascal?

Can I get... a low cost version of Delphi? where?

many thanks

Joe

Reply to
Joe G (Home)

Delphi:

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if you'll wait a few days.

I don't know anything about the quality of freepascal, but I'm glad to see Borland's dialect of Pascal being ported to other environments. At Borland, Anders Hejlsberg did a very good job designing and implementing several levels of extension to Pascal until he made it into an object-oriented language very good for Windows programming (Delphi). Then he moved over to Microsoft and designed C# for them, a language that is semantically very similar although the syntax is C-like.

Reply to
mc

Something like boa (

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) or SPE (
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) will give you a nice IDE for making gui programs with python.

Add pySerial for the serial port interface.

mvh.,

David

Reply to
David Brown

Python is used by a wide range of people, including beginners, but also including programming experts who just want to get a program working. I've used a number of tools for PC programming (with a lot of Delphi), but find that Python can be a much quicker way to solve problems. It's probably not a good choice if you are a full-time PC programmer looking to get the very best performance from your final code, and it doesn't have the kind of added tools you'll get with MSVC++ or Borland's tools, but if you don't need them, they are just bloat. It's all a matter of choice and personal preference, of course, but don't dismiss Python as a beginner's language or a glorified scripting language.

Reply to
David Brown

Freepascal has the advantage of being free and open source, as well as directly cross-platform between windows and linux. But last I looked, it is still pretty incomplete. It might be good enough for simple jobs, but it is not (yet) for mass usage. Delphi, on the other hand, is an excellent development package (at least, up to about Delphi 6 - before the .net drivel) for quickly making gui apps on windows. I tend to use Python more these days, but it depends on the task in hand.

It should be possible to get a low-cost version of Delphi - they turn up regularly in magazine CD's and you can probably get older versions (which is what you probably want anyway) very cheaply.

Reply to
David Brown

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