April 25, 2004
>
> >Learn D.
> >
>
> Yeah D is probably the best language to begin with before learning C++ <g>

Ok ok I get the picture ;) but is there a book yet that for D apart from the D the language <g> .

Yeric


April 25, 2004
> There is a GUI designer in VC++ as part of MFC, but it's not nice like
VB's.

There is an excuse for one <g> but I have not used it, I have been trying to learn the core language first then go onto windows programming.


April 25, 2004
Yeric wrote:

>
>Ok ok I get the picture ;) but is there a book yet that for D apart from the
>D the language <g> .
>  
>
Nope.

This group is a good resource.
A book on C++ or java (that doesn't discuss the libraries) is probably one course of action to learning D.

I do think, however that the best way to learn a language is by doing and looking at what others have done.  There are plenty of D tutorials around.  You should check out the wiki (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?FrontPage) and dsource (http://www.dsource.org/tutorials/).

Best thing to so is to imagine something and then try to do it.  When you get stuck ask this newsgroup or even chat on the D ICQ group - irc.dprogramming.com  #D.

>Yeric
>  
>



-- 
-Anderson: http://badmama.com.au/~anderson/
April 25, 2004
Yeric wrote:

>>There is a GUI designer in VC++ as part of MFC, but it's not nice like
>>    
>>
>VB's.
>
>There is an excuse for one <g> but I have not used it, I have been trying to
>learn the core language first then go onto windows programming.
>
Yeah I think MFC is really icky.

-- 
-Anderson: http://badmama.com.au/~anderson/
April 25, 2004
Yeric wrote:
> ?? I think it is only fair that someone who has spent a lot of time and
> effort developing something
> useful should be paid for it if they want, but this would depend if it was
> good enough in
> the first place :)

Yes and no.  I think the biggest problem here is that so many programming languages are free... so a language would have to be spectacularly good to not be.

Even Microsoft recently released their optimized compiler for free - and before that they were offering a compiler for free.

I, myself, write open source (well, not always GPL, but pretty close...) projects which are all free.  I have spent hours upon hours (in fact, a year's worth of hours!) on this - and I've never asked any money... although we (the team I work with) do offer a paid priority support option.

So, I'm not just a freeloader saying everything should be free.  Rather, I think programming is an "academic" enough thing that it's more like science than retail.

Unless I'm mistaken, this is the rough view point of most open source people.  Instead of paying for the software, you "pay" by giving back and contributing things like libraries, contructive comments, and support for the software.

Again as someone who provides open source software to thousands across the world, I get more enjoyment out of seeing people happy with my software, helping others or contributing in other ways, than I would by getting $50/hour for programming. (which is my usual rate for hardware or technical support when in person... and would make me a very, very rich man.)

But, I didn't write Eiffel, nor have I ever used it.  Maybe it is worth however much is being charged for it... maybe the author(s) don't get the same joy out of seeing their users use it.

-[Unknown]
April 25, 2004
Yeric schrieb:
>>I don't know what ADO is, but how is it acessed? Is there some library
>>in C or C++ for it? If the source is available, you can compile it with
>>DMD and then wrap it with SWIG/D.
> 
> 
> ADO = ActiveX Data Objects A Microsoft library designed to plug into VB and
> VC++, I believe it has a COM interface as well, used to acees and manipulate
> recordsets in databases either OLE DB or ODBC, providing a nice abstraction
> layer to avoid exposing mere mortals to the complexities of ODBC and OLE DB
> Raw :)

Ok, so it's ActiveX. ActiveX is COM, COM is supported in D through interface. As far as i know, it is possible to query an installed COM object of its interface, this can be used to generate a D imports file, as well as to make a User Interface editor, which would work with COM objects and output D source. However, it takes someone who knows something about COM - and that is definately not me.

>>There is not much confusing in multiple inheritance in C++, apart from
>>the hard-to-handle consequences of the things you should not do anyway. :>
> 
> Oh I see it does not matter how many times I read the section on MI I just
> do not get it :( and I haver been reading the excellent Bruce Eckel Book
> Thinking in C++ 2nd Edition Volume One, and yes I agree it is one of the
> easier books to understand, but I think I do not fully understand OO yet I
> understand the concept just not the implementation :(

Then i have to agree to Mathew, who just said basically the same as i did, just *much* better.

> So essentially Single Inheritance is ok, and not the really bad thing it is
> made out to be in MI languages ?

True, because it is always not simple single inheritance we have. And D might make one step further.

> I have never heard of Sather until now

Because it has too few friends to support it. :/ Pity for a fine high performance high safety no-nonsense language.

> You mention library wrapping, but is this only possible if you have the
> source code ?? I doubt any source code exists for Microsoft products ?

Library wrapping requieres that you have a way to call the code from the source language. For example, Sather/C can embed tiny pieces of C code which are passed as they are to the compiler. Sather/Java can call Java classes directly, if you describe their interface in Java syntax first, and Sather/C also has this sort of thing. D can call C code directly, but you also have to describe its interface in D syntax. There is one limitation though: can you call this C code from the corresponding C compiler? Sather/C is known to work with GCC, and can probably be made work with other C compilers. DigitalMars D compiler works only with DigitalMars C because of pecularities of a linking format. There is also Gnu D compiler, which works with GCC. But beware: there might be libraries which are available only for MSVC, and then you're trapped.

C++ libraries requiere 2 additional levels of wrapping - since other languages cannot call C++ code, you have to wrap it into C function calls, import them into target language (e.g. D), and wrap them into D code which looks and behaves like C++ code. There is a tool called SWIG developed for Python, Sather, and many other languages, which does all of these steps automatically. Andy has written a module for it which works with D. (http://andy.tadan.us/d/)

> He he famous last words, Is there a gui designer for D yet, is there one
> planned in the future? I laugh everytime I read about VC++ I just cant see
> what is visual about it where is the nice gui designer like you get with VB
> ?

Oh, it will take a long, long way until we have one. It involves parsing D code and generating auto-bindings. But for ActiveX based developement only, i would think one could be written quite easily, but i can't say for sure since i don't know much about COM.

> Thanks for the insight

You're welcome!

-eye
April 25, 2004
> Yes and no.  I think the biggest problem here is that so many programming languages are free... so a language would have to be spectacularly good to not be.

He he so how do M$ sleep at night asking people to pay for things like VB <g>
>
> Even Microsoft recently released their optimized compiler for free - and before that they were offering a compiler for free.
>

Yes this surprised me too but then again all their .Net is free if you download the SDK

> I, myself, write open source (well, not always GPL, but pretty close...)
> projects which are all free.  I have spent hours upon hours (in fact, a
> year's worth of hours!) on this - and I've never asked any money...
> although we (the team I work with) do offer a paid priority support
option.

Then you have my respect, I admire Open Source and the principles behind it, if I could write anything useful right now, I would give it to open source if it was good enough, since I have used many Open source tools including GCC, alas at the moment I am struggling period.
>
> So, I'm not just a freeloader saying everything should be free.  Rather, I think programming is an "academic" enough thing that it's more like science than retail.

Programming is a way of life :) even though I am not a guru yet, I enjoy it like some people like golf

>
> Unless I'm mistaken, this is the rough view point of most open source people.  Instead of paying for the software, you "pay" by giving back and contributing things like libraries, contructive comments, and support for the software.

This is precisley the reason Open source exists to spread the knowledge among mortals to learn instead of keeping it to a chosen few.
>
> Again as someone who provides open source software to thousands across the world, I get more enjoyment out of seeing people happy with my software, helping others or contributing in other ways, than I would by getting $50/hour for programming. (which is my usual rate for hardware or technical support when in person... and would make me a very, very rich man.)

coding makes me happy too I enjoy the challenge of transferring my ideas into another language not unlike  foreigh translator in some ways.

>
> But, I didn't write Eiffel, nor have I ever used it.  Maybe it is worth however much is being charged for it... maybe the author(s) don't get the same joy out of seeing their users use it.

Perhaps it is, I might not have heard of it if it were not for my tutor
mentioning it i believe there are many programming languages out there it is
just that C/C++ and Java hold the limelight.
I only know of D because I have the DM C++ compiler if it were not for that
I would never have known, I am going to let my tutor read up on it he is an
old Unix Guru and loves new programming languages I am sure he will be
interested in D.
I myself do not understand enought to pass judgement, but if it delivers
half of what it says then I will use it.

Now whether it is yet complete enough to do my OO project in I do not know, from what I have read then I think it is, it might be missing certain things that I do not know about anyhow.

Yeric


April 25, 2004
> > [sorry I had to break mid-sentence, but ... don't you take a breath? <G>]
>
> he he no, I can actually type faster than I can speak or think :)

I know where you're coming from. ;)

> > I love C++, and it's still the language I _think_ in, but I really
> struggle to
> > recommend it to people entering software engineering. This is really bad
> for me
> > since my first two books and most of my articles are on the subject. He
> he.
> >
>
> So what might you recommend ?

D and Ruby

> > Geez, man, give us a full stop [US-Trans: "period"] every now and then!
> Ok . <g>
> >
> > VB is a joke language, and no-one should be suggesting it to someone to
> learn as
> > a first language. I would consider that a deliberate sabotage of that
> person's
> > future in software engineering.
>
> I agree, it allows anyone with little programming knowledge to program
> (badly)

Exactly. The same can be said of .NET to some degree - I've certainly seen it abused in commercial developments.

> > Don't get hooked on one database layer. Force yourself to learn at least
> two
> > different ones, as they're incredibly proprietary, and designed entirely
> for the
> > lock-in.
>
> Is this not the case with all M$ products. <-- note the full stop or period <g>

With almost all (VC++ 7.1 is pretty conformant.)

> > Paying for a language is joke. Period [Rest of English speaking
> world-Trans:
> > "full stop"]
>
> ?? I think it is only fair that someone who has spent a lot of time and
> effort developing something
> useful should be paid for it if they want, but this would depend if it was
> good enough in
> the first place :)

If they want it to succeed, they can't charge for the language. Just the consultancy fees a couple of years down the line.

> > I have recently recommended D as one of two languages (the scripting
> language was
> > Ruby) to learn to a close friend who wants to dig a way out of FoxPro
> hell. I
> > think it is rapidly accelerating to a point of extreme usefulness. For
> example,
> > today I wrote a tool that I've wanted for years - a registry grepper - and
> it
> > only took me three hours. (The fact that D's Win32 registry module is of
> the
> > highest quality, cough cough, may have something to do with that.)
> Basically,
> > it's std.windows.registry and std.regexp, and just pure client code with
> no hacks
> > or workarounds. And it works a treat. (I'm going to submit it as a sample
> for
> > Phobos for the next release, or the one after maybe, depending on my
> desire to
> > polish.) I've shyed away from writing it in C++ or C# for years, purely
> because
> > of the effort in messing around with all the twiddly bits. But D ... 3
> hours!
> >
> > Learn D.
> >
> >
>
> And of course this is a completely unbiased answer :)

It is. First and foremost I'm a C++ programmer, and probably always will be. I also work with C#/.NET, Java, C, Perl, Python and Ruby.

D is the language I would recommend to someone learning a compiled language, and Ruby for a scripting one.

> Perhaps you are right, doing is learning, I have often found this to be the
> case
> However I have twice in VB used this method od doing is learning, only to
> find
> I have written something that already existed in the library. <-- note the
> period again [Full Stop] <g>
>
> Thanks

You're welcome


April 26, 2004
"J Anderson" <REMOVEanderson@badmama.com.au> wrote in message news:c6gong$2b4n$2@digitaldaemon.com...
> Yeric wrote:
>
> >>There is a GUI designer in VC++ as part of MFC, but it's not nice like
> >>
> >>
> >VB's.
> >
> >There is an excuse for one <g> but I have not used it, I have been trying
to
> >learn the core language first then go onto windows programming.
> >
> Yeah I think MFC is really icky.
>
> --

You don't need to use MFC to use VC++'s GUI designer. Add a dialog resource to your non-MFC project; you just can't use the class wizard stuff because you have to manually setup a dialog callback procedure and use CreateDialog() or DialogBox().


--
Christopher E. Miller


April 26, 2004
Vathix wrote:

>You don't need to use MFC to use VC++'s GUI designer. Add a dialog resource
>to your non-MFC project; you just can't use the class wizard stuff because
>you have to manually setup a dialog callback procedure and use
>CreateDialog() or DialogBox().
>
The VC++ designer is ugly and the MFC language is ugly.  It's full of macros and ditchs.

-- 
-Anderson: http://badmama.com.au/~anderson/