fpc VS leo-editor

Looking at the activity on the Free Pascal compiler[0] compared to some other, non-dead languages like Crystal[1], I would say Pascal isn't dead.

They had a major release to their most popular IDE just a few weeks ago[2].

A lot of these projects built with FP aren't as visible in the HN community, because they related to different hobbyist fields, aren't keystone components in the startup ecosystem etc. But they for sure exist.

[0] https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/activity

Free Pascal has fcl-web which should provide a HTTP/HTTPS client (among other things, it can be used to make web apps), though it comes with libcurl bindings out of the box so you could also use that too. fcl-json provides a JSON parser. FWIW "fcl" means "Free Component Library" which contains various tools (mainly exposed as classes).

The packages[0] directory of FPC contains a lot of stuff that come out of the box with the compiler and they often have an "examples" and/or "tests" directory with code you can check. There is some documentation[1] but sadly FCL is really not that well documented - you just have to check the sources for most things.

Note that this is for Free Pascal itself. Lazarus builds on it (LCL, the "Lazarus Component Library", is built on top of FCL) and adds a bunch of additional components of its own. Though usually for non-GUI stuff you just use the Free Pascal classes, Lazarus has some of its own "wrappers" that integrate with the IDE and the form/object designer. The "weblaz" package (it comes with Lazarus but you need to install it manually from Package -> Install/Uninstall Packages) provides a bunch of components for working with the web (mainly for making web apps), including the "TFPHttpClient" component which can be used to make HTTP requests. As a simple example, if you throw a TMemo (multiline text editor) control in a form, throw a TFPHttpClient component and then doubleclick on the form to edit the code to execute during the form's creation you can type "Memo1.Text:=FPHTTPClient1.Get('https://news.ycombinator.com/');" and it will put the HTML code for this forum in the memo (note that you may also need to add the opensslsockets unit in the uses section at the top of the code). Of course that is a very simple example but if you browse the properties and events of the component in the object inspector as well as the available methods by typing "FPHTTPClient1." and pressing ctrl+space in the code editor you can find most of the other functionality the component provides.

[0] https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/tree/main/pac...

[1] https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/fcl/index.html

We’ve encountered FPC issue #40229 (Wasm32 symbol xxx without index value error) but it is now happily fixed :) Many thanks go to Nikolay Nikolov from FPC team for fixing, and Andrzej Kilijański for preparing a code to easily reproduce the issue.

No sure what you mean with "some sight", but the whole source code can be found here: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/packages/fcl-base/src/csvdocument.pp

In Pascal that is really common, since the files are the modules. You publish your library as one file, and the user can import it by the file name.

I ran wc on FreePascal to search for some. There are a few, but not as many as I expected.

9k file, data structures for the compiler itself: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/./c...

30k file: Pascal parser/scope resolver: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...

And the record:

119k file, Sharepoint API (but it seems to be autogenerated): https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...

As far as libraries go, this is one of my favorites:

23k file, regular expression library: https://github.com/BeRo1985/flre/blob/master/src/FLRE.pas

I searched my own files and found a 197k file to parse HTML entities. But that was an autogenerated trie (one switch/case for each letter)

I wonder if FreePascal is affected

Looks like they ported zlib to Pascal in 1998 and left it pretty much unchanged:

https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...

What are your experiences with literate programming for handover of code?

I am thinking of tools like noweb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noweb), LEO (http://leoeditor.com/) org-mode (http://cachestocaches.com/2018/6/org-literate-programming/), scribble/lp2 (https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/lp.html#%28part._scribble_lp2_.Language%29),

My experience so far is that it can be a fantastic tool for documenting and handing over complex algorithms to successor developers. I use extensively use ersonal wikis (sometimes MoinMoin, sometimes Zim Wiki, in the last time often a combination of github with reStructuredText) for work. That might also be sufficient when handing over boring code.

I know what folding is, that's just not what I want. I want to completely hide everything that is not related to the current function. For a while, I used http://leoeditor.com/ where I could have every function/method as a node in a tree, with the node body containing just that. Looking for a way to achieve the same in vim if possible.

The lack of good node/graph based APIs for Org Mode is my beef as well. When you compare it with the APIs of the Leo Editor[1], Org pales in comparison. Manipulation that is trivial in the Leo Editor can be quite a pain in Org mode.

[1] https://leoeditor.com/

> What outliners do you know which allow end-users to feed their data into formulas for processing it without using general-purpose programming languages?

Bit of a pointless constraint, the talk is about outliners, not no-code-datamangment. Which tool today does this even offer on a useful level?

But you can look at leo editor (https://leoeditor.com), which is active for 20+ years, fully scriptable and extendable. Though, it's a hot piece of garbage for laymen. It's offers a bunch of features and plugins even for non-coders, but I'm not sure it would satisfy you for this area, if you can't code.

But I'm not sure if there ever is a tool which will satisfy everyone with just a no-code-approach.

Hmm maybe you mean:

- Programming based on fragments, not documents (e.g. LEO https://leoeditor.com/)

- Live programming (e.g. smalltalk environments)

- ... where certain actions are not available, e.g. a PL geared towards speech recognition may not support "hover"

There's also https://leoeditor.com/ where you can have a tree of nodes and execute any of them.

I had this problem until I found an editor that had outlining as it's core design paradigm. Now, with the outline always visible, it's _really_ easy to navigate any length file.

Unfortunately, at one point I got so used to navigating with the outline that I ended up making a 1500 line function in C (I was an even worse C programmer then than I am now). Because of the outline, I could read and follow it easily, but anyone with a different editor was royally screwed :-(

If you're interested, the editor is LEO (http://leoeditor.com/) it's been mentioned on HN a few times