PC Programming Language

Python.

-- Grant Edwards grante Yow! .. If I cover this at entire WALL with MAZOLA, visi.com wdo I have to give my AGENT ten per cent??

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

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

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).

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.

--

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

Regards, Richard.

here is one good place to look:

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

gcc and cygwin.

pete

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

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

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

-jg

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

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.

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

;)

Steve

Thanks all for you speedy replies.

Any comments on freepascal?

Joe

In article , Joe G (Home) writes

Use Delphi

Hi Chirs,

Can you eloborate why... Delphi over freepascal?

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

many thanks

Joe

Delphi:

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.

Something like boa (

Add pySerial for the serial port interface.

mvh.,

David

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.

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.