Programming Languages

Before you can start to plunge yourself into the world of programming, you obviously need a language to let you put together your creations, and realise your idea. This was one of the things that frustrated me for some time- I only had an ancient, graphics free version of BASIC to play with, which ran so slowly that if you added a couple of calculation you could see the slowdown. This all changed when I discovered a neglected copy of QBASIC on the hard rive of my 486, which I soon started to put to ambitious use. Speed and control was still a problem however: and this led me to the use of Pascal 6.0, which is one of the fasted languages I have used, with some of the simplest syntax. It may not have the widespread use of C, but you can write logical programs from scratch in a matter of minutes in Pascal, while retaining a healthy speed and almost complete control. I once knocked up a graphical Mandelbrot generator from scratch in a 45 minute lunch break to show a friend, replete with mouse control. Most of my work has been done in Pascal 6.0, and since Borland still do not release even a free demo, I offer this language free to download on these pages. Naturally, being a real mode 16-bit DOS language, Pascal has its limitations- and this is where, for the purpouses of constructing various tools and processing devices, I turn to Delphi 4.0. This admittedly lacks much of the speed of Pascal, and can be pain to do some very simple procedures, but lets you put together all the 32-bit windows controls immeditately, is fast to compile and allows the user a surprising amount of control, allowing the creation of massive arrays, something that is problematic in Pascal. Sadly, Delphi 4.0 is a little too large to host on my site, but you can obtain a demo from Borland. For those of you that want to experience the retro chic of my very early work, I have QBASIC available for download, which I bundle with a selection of programs that I constructed when I was about 13. In addition, I have also done some work in Assembly language, primarily for the construction of graphical libraries when speed is all important. Assembler allows the programmer to time each instruction precisely, according to the clock speed of the processor and the memory bus, and so to optimise the code to the point where single clock cycles can be considered. Since the processor is instructed directly, this is the fastest possible method of programming simple procedures- but is also notoriously frustrating and unstable. All of these pages are accessable through the sublinks box on the left.