Fwd: Friday finking: IDE 'macro expansions'

[Thomas Passin]

On 3/18/2023 8:15 AM, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
> On 2023-03-18 08:46:42 +0000, Alan Gauld wrote:
>> On 17/03/2023 17:55, Thomas Passin wrote:
>>>> I used Delphi and Smalltalk/V which both pretty much only exist within
>>>> their own IDEs and I used their features extensively.
>>>
>>> Back when Delphi first came out, when I first used it, I don't remember
>>> any IDE; one just used a text editor.
>>
>> I think you might be meaning TurboPascal, Delphi's forerunner. It just
>> had a compiler and text editor.
> 
> I'd still classify Turbo Pascal as an IDE. It wasn't a standalone
> compiler you would invoke on source files you wrote with some other
> tool. It was a single program where you would write your code, compile
> it, see the errors directly in the source code. I think it even had a
> debugger which would also use the same editor window (Turbo C did).

Yes, TurboPascal was a brilliant product for its time.  And it was much 
cheaper than getting, say, a complete C compiler package, and way easier 
and faster to use.

> 
>> But Delphi from day 1 was an IDE designed to compete with Visual
>> Basic. Everything was geared around the GUI builder.
> 
> Turbo Pascal predated GUIs, so it wouldn't have a GUI builder. Also not
> everything you develop needs a GUI (in fact I haven't written a real
> application (i.e. not a learning project) with a traditional desktop GUI
> for 20 years) so the presence or absence of a GUI builder isn't an
> essential criterion on whether something is or is not an IDE.
> 
>          hp
> 
>