What’s in a Word … ?

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] In an exchange with David Heffernan both on SO and in the comments here on Te Waka, I had cause to climb in my own personal “Wayback Machine” and further investigate an apparent change in compiler behaviour between Delphi 2007 and 2009. This change was first identified as the result of some code of mine that stopped working in Delphi 2009. The instinctive reaction is “It must be some Unicode issue”, but it turned out that the “problem” was actually a fix to a compiler bug!

Sugary Goodness in “Nougat”

[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Continuing the theme of recent – and upcoming – posts about new (and not so new) syntax in modern (and not so modern) variations on the Pascal language, I just have to comment on what I regard as yet another stunningly good job that the guys at RemObjects have done in their “Nougat” flavoured Oxygene.  Specifically in relation to how they have implemented the named method parts syntax in Objective-C.

Lazarus 1.0 : First[-ish] Impressions

[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] It has been a looong time since I last looked at Lazarus. So long in fact that I don’t remember exactly when it was. Whenever it was I don’t think I ever actually managed to even get it up and running at that point. Certainly I don’t remember much about it if I ever did. But with the timely Lazarus 1.0 announcement last week, I have gone back to have another look. And this is what I found.

XE3 EULA: The Facts vs The Spin

[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] I wasn’t going to say anything further on this as it has been pretty much covered in the forums and on other blogs, but when a duly annointed “MVP” suggests that I should publish a post explaining that the news about the proposed changes in the EULA were FUD, then it behoves me to put some stark, plain facts on the table.