Affinity Pascal would be great

[William Overington]

This is all off-topic for this thread.

If you want to discuss this you might consider starting a thread in the new general forum.

https://punster.me/serif/

I replied to your off-topic comments in this thread before as I felt the need to defend my work, even though it meant going way off-topic.

Yes, I know that I am happy when social threads go off-topic in an interesting way, but this is a thread requesting a new Affinity product.

Nobody has agreed with Affinity Pascal being a good idea yet, there have been objections, some of it with reasons, some just objecting.

Some helpful comments about other software too, so the thread has been beneficial.

Yet I am not going to discuss in this thread the topics that you keep raising here.

William

 

[GarryP]

Just out of interest William, how much do you think it would cost Serif to implement what you propose?
I’m not asking for an exact figure, just a ‘ballpark’ amount – the count of numbers before the decimal point would be the most interesting part of the answer.

[William Overington]

I have no idea what it would cost.

This is because I envisage Serif staff starting with a copy of the free download of Turbo Pascal 5 and then having a look at what needs to be done to get it to work on a modern PC runnimg Windows 10.

So, it is possible that someone who has the knowledge of Windows systems and so on might in effect say "Oh, is that all that is stopping it working straight off, I can fix that in five minutes". Though it might be a far bigger issue to get it to work.

Yet even if a computer expert can get it working in the computing laboratory, I appreciate (in a qualitative sense as I have little knowledge of commerce) that a company cannot just say "Fine, put it on the web and charge so much for it" as there are business issues.

A lot of this though comes down to management will. If a computer expert can get it working, not necessarily in five minutes yet can get it working in a reasonable time (where I have no idea what 'reasonable' would mean in this context) and management wants to get it marketed then it could happen.

However, if, for whatever reason, management does not want to even consider doing it, then it won't get done, even if it is feasible.

So, it is a matter for Serif management.

I have put forward the suggestion.

I would like to buy the product and use it. I could use it for graphic art, I could use it to read in plain text files and process them, either producing a new output file or a screen display, either as text or graphics. i know the software dates from the 1990s, yet it was straightforward to use, ideal in a learning environment, and capable of producing excellent results. Yes, I know that software dating back to the 1990s might be regarded as obsolete, yet please consider that much older techniques, such as pencils are still in use for art and letterpress printing is still used for printing some things.

So, yes, I have only provided the suggestion, I know there would be more to it, yet maybe as a result of this thread someone from Serif will consider the idea please.

William

 

[GarryP]

5 minutes ago, William Overington said:

maybe as a result of this thread someone from Serif will consider the idea

I really do hope not – for many reasons, some of which are given above by other people – but, as you say, you have made your suggestion, and that’s pretty much as much as any of us can do here.

[William Overington]

So are you hoping that nobody from Serif will even consider the idea, not for a second, completely disregard it?

Avoid any consideration whatsoever, treat it as if it had never been suggested?

Not even think about the possibility for five minutes, not ask a programming and systems expert to have a look for an hour at whether it is possible?

William

 

[William Overington]

Do not pass Go

Do not get Affinity Pascal

William

 

[GarryP]

4 minutes ago, William Overington said:

So are you hoping that nobody from Serif will even consider the idea, not for a second, completely disregard it?

Yes.

4 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Avoid any consideration whatsoever, treat it as if it had never been suggested?

Yes.

5 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Not even think about the possibility for five minutes, not ask a programming and systems expert to have a look for an hour at whether it is possible?

Yes.

These are simply my opinions on the matter, not 'commandments from on high'.

Serif can do (or not do) whatever they like with their time/money/effort/software; I have no agency in that regard.
If they do look at it, or consider it, or experiment with it, or anything else, then that's entirely up to them.
I just think that adding a Pascal SDK/IDE to the Affinity application suite would be a total waste of time/effort/money, which could be spent on other things which are much more relevant to the users of their software.

As I said above, these are just my opinions. You have given yours, I have given mine, and I think that's pretty fair.

[William Overington]

15 minutes ago, GarryP said:

..., which could be spent on other things which are much more relevant to the users of their software.

That is a reason that seems reasonable.

Thank you for replying.

William

 

[PaulEC]

Just to add my "two-penneth": I really don't care one way or the other if Serif decide to make a "Pascal" app, a DAM app, animation app, Linux apps etc etc etc, that's entirely up to them. The only thing that concerns me is if the development of other apps impacts on Serif's ability to solve long standing bugs and add much needed improvements/additions to their existing apps.

[William Overington]

28 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

Just to add my "two-penneth": I really don't care one way or the other if Serif decide to make a "Pascal" app, a DAM app, animation app, Linux apps etc etc etc, that's entirely up to them. The only thing that concerns me is if the development of other apps impacts on Serif's ability to solve the bugs and add much needed improvements/additions to their existing apps.

Wel I suppose that if it were to be Affinity Pascal or colour font support in Affinity Publisher and Affinity Designer, including being able to export a PDF that can display them (perhaps needing to be by producing a set of monochrome fonts dynamically from the layers of the colour font). However, maybe we can have both.

Aim high.

Never grumble away opportunities.

Be prepared to consider seriously the at-first-glance seemingly impossible.

William

 

[Wosven]

Hi @William Overington,

You can play with the Turtle here: https://turtlegraphics.fun/overview.html

Have complexe examples: https://turtlegraphics.fun/examples.html

And try to do your owns, and save them as PNG (sadly no SVG): Demo

You can have fun here also: https://codepen.io/adrianparr/pen/MYyWdq

 

If you have LibreOffice, you can also play with it (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreLogo):

Quote

LibreLogo is embedded in every version of LibreOffice after 4.2.3.3, released in 2014. It can also be installed as an extension for earlier versions.^[4]

It's a toolbar in Writer (View → Toolbars → Logo)

And some tutorial: http://www.stuestoel.no/office/logo/en/logo-opna.php

[William Overington]

@Wosven

Thank you.

I have found that it can be run online.

https://turtlegraphics.fun/turtle.html

I have had a go at altering their demonstratin file a little and got the following as a png file.

So that file can be used within an Affinity application, for example in Affinity Publisher to produce artwork for a greetings card.

Then the greetings card can be produced in hardcopy form using a web-based facility (and a payment card).

Perhaps using several such png files.

William

 

 

[v_kyr]

- You can also tryout Processing, which should offer you a bunch of much more graphics and image processing possibilities.

• Processing
• Processing examples
• Processing tutorials

- Another one to play with is NodeBox3 (available/usable with: Win, MacOS, Linux), exports as SVG, PDF, PNG etc.

- For MacOS another good one is PlotDevice, which supports exports as raster (PNG, JPG, GIF, TIFF) and for vectors as (PDF, EPS).

So there are a bunch of tools like ...

1. Processing
2. NodeBox3
3. PlotDevice
4. DrawBot
5. ... and so on ...

... where most of these are Python based!

 

 

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

most of these are Python based

I don’t imagine that turtles get on too well with pythons!!

[Wosven]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

turtles get on too well with pythons

You're wrong, they go well and the result is nice:

https://www.clarisvirot.com/en/home/2620-gold-turtle-python-chocolate-belt.html

[PaoloT]

Come on, Serif! It's 2022, and you don't have a free open source Pascal package for Linux! I'll return to Adobe!

 

[jayesjay]

I have just gone to the turtle site,  https://turtlegraphics.fun/turtle.html that you recommended, William, and opened an example.

I then saved it and entered it into a PPX9 page via ^G, as a png

This worked fine, and although I don't use Affinity, I expect it would work there.

So that may answer your need to do Turtle artwork and put it into an Affinity document, surely.

[Komatös]

Who needs Mandelbrot when you can have Käsebrot? 😂🤣 German joke

[v_kyr]

The Python prog lang way of turtle — Turtle graphics (from the Python docs) and the common wikipedia turtle graphics entry.

Other than that ...

Quote

Turtle graphics, also referred to as hedgehog graphics, are an image description language in which one imagines that a pen-carrying robot (the turtle) moves on the drawing plane and uses simple commands such as lift the pen, lower it, move forward run and turn, can be controlled. This idea has been realized several times, for example as a control language for pen plotters (HPGL), as part of the programming language for home computers (BASIC, Pascal ... on Amiga, Atari), Smalltalk and as the basic idea of the educational programming language LOGO.

Graphic systems similar to turtle graphics continue to be used in schools, because such a motivating, playful introduction is promoted and the geometric imagination is better trained than with access via absolute coordinates. Compared to the classic turtle graphics from LOGO, these systems have been significantly expanded, so that some real GUI applications (at school level) can be created with them. This applies, for example, to the Python modules xturtle and frog.

In the professional field, the turtle approach was dropped again in favor of coordinate-based graphic description and is now essentially only used to display fractals using Lindenmayer systems.

 

[AdamStanislav]

6 hours ago, William Overington said:

I have fund that

What kind of fund?

[AdamStanislav]

On 2/17/2022 at 4:09 AM, William Overington said:

Could Serif please consider producing Affinity Pascal please, perhaps based upon Borland Turbo Pascal?

Oh for nerding out loud! Why not go even more prediluvial and produce Affinity Fortran? 👴 If you are really stuck on the ancient language designed for teaching rather than actual programming, use GNU Pascal.

[Alfred]

32 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

Why not go even more prediluvial and produce Affinity Fortran?

What about Lisp, COBOL, or APL?

 

[John Rostron]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

What about Lisp, COBOL, or APL?

 

Snobol? I used to use this for symbolic differentiation.

John

[v_kyr]

45 minutes ago, Alfred said:

What about Lisp ...

Well a full blown Common Lisp implementation, even very powerful, would be much oversized here. But a smaller reduced subset Lisp-variant like Scheme would be possible. The later is also something GIMP uses as it's major scripting language (see Scheme 2 and Script-Fu).

However, something which has to be included/embedded as scripting language support into Affinity apps has to be ideally interpreter based. So compiler based prog languages like those named in this thread so far, aren't well suited for such tasks at all.

Thus overall some interpreter based prog language implementation is the way to go here, which can be well mapped/wrapped together with/into the main Affinity C++ context. Good widely used and well known candidates therefor would be for example Lua, Javascript/Typescript, Python. - Others like Basic, Ruby, Scheme, Perl ... etc. have long since fallen more or less behind for such purposes.

 

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

compiler based prog languages like those named in this thread so far, aren't well suited

Lisp and APL are both interpretive programming languages.