Hi everybody--
I figured I would introduce myself, having just signed on to the list
here. Some of you may already know me and my work. I've been a Pascal
fanatic since I discovered the language in 1978 and wrote heavily about
it for many years. I wrote COMPLETE TURBO PASCAL in 1985 and kept it
current for eight years, until 1993. At that point Delphi was well
underway, and I moved most of my efforts there. The last edition of
COMPLETE TURBO PASCAL had to be renamed for a couple of reasons, and it
became BORLAND PASCAL FROM SQUARE ONE, focusing on BP7. That edition was
published in 1993, but the publisher was shut down in a merger that same
year, and few of the books that were printed were actually sold.
I've been trying to figure out what to do with the book since that time.
(All rights reverted to me long ago.) Recently Anthony Henry suggested
something that I had thought of a couple of years ago: Recasting the
book for Free Pascal. Time permitting, that's what I intend to do. I
was paid fairly well for the book in 1992, so I'm going to release it
under Creative Commons, which is a sort of GPL for textual material. The
ebook PDF will be free, and I'll post the PDF on Lulu.com so that people
can order printed copies if they prefer to read a paper book. Those
printed copies won't be free, obviously, but they won't be expensive,
either. (I won't know how expensive until I recast the book, as the cost
to print a copy varies linearly with the page count.)
I've had Free Pascal installed on a corner of my hard drive for five or
six years now, and although I haven't written anything ambitious in it,
I've loaded and compiled a bit of the old Pascal code that I've had
lying around for 25 years. I haven't explored it completely, but I'll
get back to it and exercise a lot more of it in coming months.
Here are a few issues that I'd like some advice on:
1. The book is quite large, at 810 pages. To make a printed book on Lulu
that won't fall apart after one reading, the length has to be *much*
less than that. I'm thinking of cutting it up into a couple of shorter
books. The first book will be purely an introduction to the Pascal
language, and will go as far as locality and scope. (If anyone here has
the original printed book, that would be up to about page 300.) A second
book will take it from there, and go into a lot more depth about
separate compilation, disk I/O, debugging, linked lists and so on. There
may be enough material for a third book, depending on how I cut it and
how much I will simply delete--coverage of overlays, for example. I
really need to keep the length of a single book down to about 300 pages.
Since the ebooks will be free, this shouldn't be a problem.
2. I need to know what platform to base the book on. It's now a DOS
book, and I can easily recast it for work in a console window under
Windows. However, I suspect that more people use it under Linux. Would
basing it on Linux (using text mode in a terminal window) be better?
3. The book does not cover objects in depth. I'm of two minds about how
to cover object-oriented programming: I prefer Delphi's object model,
but I've used Turbo Vision (I named it, in fact) and have some example
code. Which would be better? (I don't think I would cover objects in the
first book, at any rate.
4. How important is it to cover GUI apps written from text mode? (That
is, without using Lazarus or something else Delphi-like.) This wouldn't
be in the first volume, obviously, but are enough people doing it
(whether for Windows or Linux) to make the coverage worthwhile? I didn't
do much on GUI apps prior to Delphi, apart from some minor messing
around with Turbo Pascal for Windows. So that would be all new research
for me and might take awhile--and I would prefer to cover it via Lazarus
anyway.
That's the most of it. Alas, I don't have a Mac and can't really cover
OS/X. However, if anyone here would like to work over the material once
I release it for FPC, I'd be happy with that.
Do let me know what you think. I need to mention that I work fairly
slowly (mostly because I'm not retired and have a lot of other things to
do) but I'm willing to release chapters as I finish them if people want
them.
Good luck and thanks for listening. I'm on the list now and will start
digging back into FPC again.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Colorado Springs, Colorado
www.duntemann.com
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