BO5, Turbo Vision, Objects

Sun, 9 Feb 1997 22:03:19 +0100 (MET)

Sven Hilscher wrote:
> You also still working on the GPC-TurboVision ???

Yes, in some sense.  I am still working on BO5.  At the moment, it is
the Windows platform which prevents me from going on.  :-(  Everything
else in the low-level drivers more or less works, so I would like to
start to implement the actual user interface objects.

However BO5 is not intended to become a drop-in replacement for Turbo
Vision (just like GPC is not intended to imitate the Borland Pascal
compiler) but something more powerful.

In case somebody wants to have a compatible replacement for Turbo Vision,
there are (at least) two ways to get it:

  * There is FreeVision which comes with FPK Pascal.  It should not be
    too difficult to port it to GPC.

  * Borland has released the C source of Turbo Vision (*not* the Pascal
    source) into the public domain.  One could translate it to Pascal,
    imitating the functionality of the Pascal Turbo Vision.

I do not recommend to patch the "real" Turbo Vision to run with GNU Pascal
because it would remain under Borland's license, so we could not freely
distribute it.  The only thing we could do would be to distribute the
patch, so every owner of a Borland Turbo Vision license could apply it.

> I'm only will using the objects for this part if I  
> dont lose lots of speed (I think 5% it's worth).

I think the loss of speed will be less than 1% due to GPC's very 
efficient optimization algorithms.  But one should try.

> BTW: GPC is'nt perfect and this will take a long time too but I like it in  
> spite of that.

So do I.  What I really like is to have the possibility to get the source
of the compiler; so if nobody else is fixing some annoying bug for me,
I can try myself on it.  I remember several letters I have sent to
Borland without getting any answer besides "your letter has arrived" ...

    Peter

  Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer
peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [970201]
       maintainer GNU Pascal - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]

Peter Gerwinski (peter@agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de)