20 year ago or so I took some programming courses. In a computing
environment that was not Windows. Just a single program running
environment.

Courses were in FORTRAN, Basic, Pascal, and assembler. Anyhow I wanted to
start
fooling around with a little programming again. I have not written any
programs for operation in a Windows environment. But have to admit that
Windows environment has me thoroughly intimidated. What with registry files
etc.

Basically what I want to do is be able to create a file on a hard drive,
write to that file, retrieve information from that file, do comparisons,
simple arrays, display information, etc.

I'm looking for suggestions for which programming package to get. I
preferred Pascal in the decades past. But I also looking for something that
will have me interacting with the Windows environment on a simple basis. In
the past I had purchased Borland's C++ package but really didn't get into
it. I wasn't successful getting a program to run. I've always found
writing on a machine level quite tedious.

I guess I'm really looking for something at Pascal or Basic Language level.
I remember talking to a high school computer teacher a number of years ago
where he was talking about a 'visual' language package. Something along the
lines of point and click with a mouse.

I have Windows 98 running on one of my machines and Windows XP running on
another. The operating environment of the programs that I write wouldn't
need to be sophisticated. An MS-DOS environment would probably be fine.

TIA,
Jim

"J. A. Ek" wrote:
Python, you want Python. Seriously, you will love Python. Also, it's
free.
Rather than me trying to tell you about it, you can check it out
starting with http://www.python.org and comp.lang.python.

C would work fine for you if you don't want to do any Windows
programming. C has the advantage of a great book, namely K & R. There
are several free compilers; I use Dev-Cpp, which does C++ also, but I
only do C.

Mitchell Timin (currently using only C and not doing Windows
programming)

--
"Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in
pursuit of the goal." - Friedrich Nietzsche

http://annevolve.sourceforge.net is what I'm into nowadays.
Humans may write to me at this address: zenguy at shaw dot ca

J. A. Ek wrote:

You just described Delphi perfectly.

Borland Delphi. Sort of Pascal-for-Windows.

--
Richard Heathfield : binary@eton.powernet.co.uk
"Usenet is a strange place." - Dennis M Ritchie, 29 July 1999.
C FAQ: http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
K&R answers, C books, etc: http://users.powernet.co.uk/eton

In article <bsq8bk$fcb$1@hercules.btinternet.com>,
dontmail@address.co.uk.invalid says...
Or their C++ builder product if you want to avoid the time warp
that is Pascal. Having to convert back and forth from = to :=
drives me crazy. YMMV.

--
Randy Howard
2reply remove FOOBAR

Randy Howard <randy.howard@FOOmegapathdslBAR.net> wrote in
news:MPG.1a5a6d62bdb993cc989a55@news.megapathdsl.n et:

On the other hand, having to convert back and forth from = to ==
can also be maddening.

Jim Rogers

"J. A. Ek" <public.1.NOSPAM@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
news:SJ0Ib.255492$Ec1.8837642@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net:

There are many many languages to choose from. Everybody seems to have
a favorite language. In fact, out of 10 respondents you can easily get
recommendations for 20 languages.

If you want something like Pascal you can look at Delphi, Modula 2,
or Ada. If you want something like basic you can try Visual Basic.

As others have noted, there are a lot of other possible choices that
do not quite look like either Pascal or Basic.

You can certainly do a lot better than an MS-DOS environment. There
are a number of free language-sensitive editors available for Windows.

Along with a compiler/interpreter and an editor you will want a good
reference book and a mentor to answer your questions. This group can
act as a mentor for many of your questions.

Jim Rogers

James Rogers wrote:
Why complicate things. He is familiar with the MS-DOS
environment, which is available under Windoze. The DJGPP system
(see <http://www.delorie.com>) can supply all the compilers of
interest, including C, Pascal, Ada, Fortran, and even C++. This
way he can get his feet wet (he was talking about processing
files) without the GUI whiz-bangs getting in the way.

Another possibility is Cygwin, but that has some wierd effects and
is considerably slower than DJGPP.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com) (cbfalconer@worldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE worldnet address!

Randy Howard wrote:

Well, /H/MMV, anyway. The OP specifically mentioned his halycon days, in
which Pascal loomed large.

As he said in his original article, "I preferred Pascal in the decades past"
and "In the past I had purchased Borland's C++ package but really didn't
get into it" and "I guess I'm really looking for something at Pascal or
Basic Language level".

If it comes to a choice between recommending VB and recommending Delphi, I
unhesitatingly choose Delphi.

--
Richard Heathfield : binary@eton.powernet.co.uk
"Usenet is a strange place." - Dennis M Ritchie, 29 July 1999.
C FAQ: http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
K&R answers, C books, etc: http://users.powernet.co.uk/eton

"J. A. Ek" <public.1.NOSPAM@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:SJ0Ib.255492$Ec1.8837642@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...

IMHO Borlands C Builder API is by far the easiest to learn if you are a
beginner. You mentioned Borland C++ above, but was that their C Builder
API or just Borland C++ 5.0? If it was Borland C Builder then I find it
incredible that you couldn't get a program to run since the steps to make a
running windows program are as follows:

1) Click File->New->Application
2) Click the 'Run' symbol on the tool bar (Green Arrow)

It's hard to see how you got that wrong :-) Although of course the
program doesn't do much (it just displays a blank form on the screen), you
can easily imrove it by dragging and dropping buttons, boxes, radio buttons,
edit boxes etc on to the form and the pressing the green button again...

After spending weeks with Microsoft Visual C and struggling with their
MDI/SDI paradigm I was able to get me program running in CBuilder in about
20 minutes once I swapped over......

Sean

Richard Heathfield wrote:

I'd choose VB, but mostly because I'm unfamiliar with Delphi.
Still, my first thought reading the OP was "Delphi" for the
exact reasons Richard mentioned.

--
|_ CJSonnack <Chris@Sonnack.com> _____________| How's my programming? |
|_ http://www.Sonnack.com/ ___________________| Call: 1-800-DEV-NULL |
|_____________________________________________|___ ____________________|

John Doherty wrote:

I downloaded this and gave it a try. After reading the tutorial
and following the instructions to the letter I had a great deal
of difficulty getting even a simple console app to compile and
run what with projects, makefiles, etc. It did something a little
different each time I tried. Easy to see why it's free! I
certainly wouldn't recommend it to a beginner.

EM

I doubt his problem was the API. More likely it was simply the language. For
simplicity...
I'd suggest Delphi, VB ( or just plain old Basic... better yet QuickBasic as
it's probably the simplest, easily obtainable Basic to aquire and learn ) or
Fortran. All of these are incredibly simple with pretty easy high level
syntax. You can start writing code pretty quickly. If you use QuickBasic or
Fortran... you don't need any Windows and free compilers are easy to come by.

Dan :-)