No problem. I guess I was just having trouble putting my thoughts into words.

Anyway, when I said "simulation of sorts" all I meant was that my project was part simulation, part game. It is a simulation but not like real-time weather modelling or anything. Much, much simpler. I would also describe it as an expirement with AI. Although I'm not using any neural networks or anything, I am still trying to make the objects in the simulation somewhat intelligent. I'll shut up before my explanation gets away from me. Don't worry, I don't plan on stopping until I finish it. Then I might think about porting it to Kylix and adding a GUI. That's all for now..

I program in PASCAL, just not real recently. I've used both Borland PASCAL and Borland C and (at that time) was actually able to get apps up and running faster with PASCAL. Math and logic operators were a bit more intuitive and the code was much more readable to a larger cross section of people (not just programmers in that language).

It's also silly to say that one language is more powerful than another. Borland PASCAL gave you access to just as much bare metal as their C compiler did. If other vendors leave these options out of their compilers, that's not the language's fault. I could teach a newbie PASCAL much faster than I could C.

I currently do most of my development in GNU C++, though I also use Borland's C++ v4 when something has to run in DOS. I would probably use PASCAL, though, if it were more widely used. Sometimes you've gotta go with the flow.

I wrote some very large applications in Pascal on the using Sparcworks on Solaris platform about 10 years ago. I found Pascal a good language to use because the strong typing helps you find programming errors relatively easily.

I liked the Sparcworks integrated environment because you can easily mix Pascal, C, C++ and Fortran etc. so you can reuse code from a number of sources if necessary.

The problem is that Pascal seems to be dying out these days. Sun no longer include Pascal in their suite of development tools. If I was doing the work again today, I would use an object orientated language, probably Java or C++.

I am hoping to port my software to Linux. I have just got the GNU Pascal and C compilers installed which both work OK. I am hoping the port will be relatively straightforward because the Sun manuals have a section that explains the differences with GNU.

I would be interested to hear what user interfaces GNU Pascal programmers tend to use. With my Sun Pascal programs I used XView, but that seems to have died out almost completely. I downloaded the source. but could not get it to work on RH 9.

Best regards,
Chris

Pascal was my second programming language. I don't use it quite often now, but I like it. It makes it easy to keep your code 'clean' (look clean, not always be clean, in fact...). I recently installed Kylix and it looks nice so maybe I'll start it again one day.

Pascal rocks! I took two years of computer science back in high school, and that's the language they taught. I think we were using Turbo Pascal in Windows 3.1 on some 486 machines... I'm a little foggy. Anyway, I got to college and ended up working for the computer science department developing an aid for students; to help them follow their catalog with less reliance on their advisor. Anyway, the program was being developed in Delphi. Then I took that experience, and wrote a class scheduling program with lots of bells and whistles. There were pointers to pointers everywhere!

I can't say that I program in it much anymore. Although the simulation you talk about is interesting. It parallels one I'm considering. I picked up a book on AI recently, and I'm in the porcess of thinking through a method to implement a BattleTech simulation. I plan on giving each mech several neural networks; one for each general decision that must be made in a turn. Then I'll set up various mechs in a free-for-all and let the neural nets adjust to see what kinds of strategies the mechs develop.

I also wanted to add genetic algorithms to alter the mech designs as well to find the "optimal" strategy in the "optimal" mech design. That would mean two distinct development vectors (neural net and design), and that probably means an exponential increase in simulation time to get meaningful results. Besides, Ithe simulation would probably run to infinity wth different strategies and designs. I can easily see a pendulum effect where aggressive and defensive strategies would repeatedly switch as the most successful.

AI has always fascinated me. If any of you felt like I did that there's some intangible quality associated with learning that humans posses and can never be translated into machine instructions, then I suggest picking up a book introducing neural nets. It's quite humbling to see just how "simple" learning is.

It's all very interesting, and all very complicated to implement well. Maybe I could offer some input if you run into a road block. Since you've been working on yours for much longer than I have, I would imagine you're well in front of me in terms of implementation ideas, limitations, and all that good stuff. I wish you luck with it regardless.

I am by no means a good (or even decent) programmer, but I like Pascal. It may not have the enormous following that C has but it's still very functional and as long as you're not writing low level stuff it's quite up to the task. People complain about Pascal being old...well it's as old as C and C is still one of the major languages used in the "real world" for all kinds of programming projects. So complaining about Pascal being old is pretty dumb.

hw

Im learning pascal at the moment. Its my first year on the 'BTEC National Diploma - IT Practitioners' and were doing Pascal for year 1, and starting c++ in the 2nd year. Only been there for like.. a month, but its my first *real* language and im really enjoying it.... me an a couple of friends on the course have got as far as getting into graphics mode and drawing polygons an shapes, an filling them with patterns an stuff haha... but yeah, nothing too hard at the moment.. though its gonna take a while to adjust into that really mathmatical state of mind :woah:

Were using Turbo Pascal 7 aswell... just for the record