A brand new Tcl/Tk release, in the form of Tcl/Tk 9.1. The new features in Tcl are a bit difficult for me to properly parse as a non-developer, but Tk’s improvements are easy to understand: it brings supports for screen readers, initial supports for bidirectional and RTL scripts, improved listbox selection colours, and more. It also happens to drop support for Windows XP appearances, if that’s something that matters to you.

We talked about the latest release of Delphi a few days ago, and that brought me to Hans Otten’s website.

This site is about my experience with the Wirth school of languages, based on the ideas and implementations of Prof Niklaus Wirth, Kenneth Bowles, Per Brinch Hansen, colleagues, and their students. And my experience with the various variants, from the P2 and P4 compilers originating in Zürich ETH, via UCSD Pascal P-System to the Borland compilers and Modula and Oberon systems. All applicable to small computers and device control.

On this website you will find information on Pascal for small machines, like Wirth compilers, the UCSD Pascal system, many scanned books and other files on UCSD Pascal, Pascal on MSX and CP/M, Delphi programming on PC, Freepascal and Lazarus on Windows and Raspberry Pi, Oberon systems. Many sources of early Pascal compilers! And last but not least my Pascal-M system!

↫ Hans Otten

If you’re into Pascal and its related languages and technologies, this is a treasure trove of information.

Delphi is still very much a thing, and still very much in active development. The current stewards of Delphi, Embarcadero, released the Delphi 13 Community Edition today.

Delphi Community Edition is a full-featured, free edition of Delphi for building native applications with the Delphi language. It includes a professional IDE, visual designers, integrated compilers and debuggers, the VCL framework for Windows development, and the FireMonkey framework for creating native applications from a shared codebase across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

It is designed for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and small teams that meet the Community Edition license requirements.

↫ Marco Cantu at the Embarcadero blog

Delphi has been around since 1995, first released for Windows 3.1. It’s both a programming language, a variant of Object Pascal, and the accompanying IDE and related tooling and frameworks, originally developed by legendary company Borland. This latest version of course adds a number of new features to the programming language, and further improves the IDE as well, this time with a brand new 64bit version. The two frameworks for visual application development, VCL and FireMonkey, have also been updated and improved.

Sadly, it’s not open source, and the Community Edition is intended for mostly non-commercial, hobbyist use. If you want to actually earn any money using Delphi, you’re going to have to step up to Delphi 13 Florence, which isn’t free.

I found some ambiguous wording in the c89(/c90) standard, where GCC and Clang disagree on the interpretation. It concerns the behavior of implicit function declarations, which were removed in c99, so this was never disambiguated.

↫ Sebastian at sebsite

I am not going pretend to understand any of this.

I have a policy to effectively never link to YouTube videos. I’ll gladly make an exception for this one.

Reflection is one of the most powerful concepts in Computer Science. Unfortunately, not every programming language is blessed enough to have it.

In the 1980s, one company, Symbolics took the concept to the logical extreme. By representing EVERYTHING as objects; they created the most powerful (and inadvertently) least private operating system ever created!

The company collapsed, but the ideas live on. Some modern languages got a full dose of reflection. Some…weren’t so lucky. I ranked them all, and in the end I’ll show you how I dragged C++ up a tier with my brand new runtime reflection library, CallMeMaybe!

↫ Laurie Wired

The GitHub description of CallMeMaybe:

CallMeMaybe (CMM) is a C++ runtime reflection library built on top of P2996 static reflection introduced in C++26. CMM purposefully mirrors many of the std::meta functions to provide a uniform interface, but allows runtime introspection, dynamic invocation, and instantiation by building a runtime reflection registry. Class members can be automatically traversed and reflected by simply adding [[=cmm::reflectable]] as an annotation. CMM implements a custom type system to completely avoid RTTI requirements.

↫ CallMeMaybe GitHub page

My YouTube linking policy will remain in place.

Tcl, or the “Tool Command Language“, created and released by John Ousterhout in 1990, deserves a place among the greatest products of the human mind. Especially when combined with its better known graphical user interface Toolkit — Tk. In 1997 Ousterhout was awarded the ACM Software System Award for Tcl/Tk, an award given to institutions or individuals recognized for developing software systems with a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both.

↫ Armen Barsegyan

Everything you could ever possibly want to know about Tcl/Tk. There’s nothing to add here; if this is up your alley – and you know if it is – just go ahead and read it, and stop wasting time here.

That is the first line of the 80s microcomputer BASIC game The Wizard’s Castle initially written for the Exidy Sorcerer platform.

It’s a REMark statement, a comment in that particular language. 10 is the line number, if you’re unfamiliar with languages that had such things.

But the interesting part was this "_(C2SLFF4 mess. A typo or garbage? No. It appears verbatim in the source code as originally published in the July, 1980 issue of Recreational Computing.

What the heck is it?

↫ Brian “Beej” Hall

A fun investigation to brighten up your Monday.

This post is about the evolution of Futhark’s type checker, motivated by a large refactoring I am about to merge. It is probably mostly of interest to other language designers, and contains some lessons I wish I had known when we first got started – although I am not particularly well-read in the type checking literature, so it’s possible all of this is old hat.

↫ The Futhark Programming Language blog

That’s a clear introduction – you know what to expect.

What happens when programmers get to vote on a complete ban on slopcoded software on their code platform? Members of Codeberg were asked to vote on a proposal to completely ban slopcoded projects from Codeberg, and in what should not be a surprising outcome to anyone not overcome with “AI” hysteria, the vast majority voted in favour of the complete ban: over 70% of Codeberg members voted to ban slopcoded projects entirely (358 in favour, 144 against, 14 abstentions).

Of course, this is not a surprising outcome. Stripped down, programming is a form of artistic expression, and programming is no different than writing, painting, composing, or any other artistic endeavour. I think it’s safe to say writers, painters, composers, and similar creatives are against “AI”, so it’s only natural programmers feel the same; poll after poll shows the overwhelming majority of respondents – usually well over 70-80% – are against “AI”.

The pro-“AI” accounts on OSNews often try to paint my anti-“AI” position as extremist, but in reality, I’m just voicing how 70-80% of people clearly state they feel. I have zero skin in this game, zero outside pressure to please any bosses to get that promotion, zero pressure to conform to avoid getting laid off, zero pressure to not contradict upper-management. I can speak freely, openly, and without fear of retaliation. And as Nikhil Suresh explains in his harrowing from-the-trenches article AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making, that’s a massive asset.

The vast majority of people – including your friends, family, and co-workers – really hate “AI”. You can either accept this, or be left behind.