Talk:Virtual Pascal

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User base

How was the wide user base measured? The maillist has 5 posts in the last half year, and the webpage only lists a handful comments on its demise.

Is there a forum somewhere or so?—Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.61.103.98 (talk) 06:47, 15 July 2005

Answer: Note that the page says in the late nineties (more mid than late nineties maybe). Since 2000 it pretty much collapsed, and even the main site is down currently, and even before 2000 it was already decreasing.

But to my knowledge that remark is pretty true, at least in Europe. The shareware/BBS scene, the OS/2 scene and the educational sector used it massively, also because it was one of the few affordable multi platform compilers before the open source movement really became usable. (and still the IDE, textmode as it is, is vastly superior over most open source ones in productivity).

That there never was a radical break from OS/2 and Dos was one of the reasons why VPascal died, due to mainly its unmaintainable codebase (pure assembler compiler!) with external nondistributable parts, all originating from its commercial past. 88.159.73.216 17:48, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Design

Virtual Pascal was NOT designed by Allan Mertner. He only hired Vitaly Miryanov after Vitaly had already developed several quite usable beta versions of Virtual Pascal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.78.52.211 (talk) 18:00, 17 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I only follow VPascal since later nineties, and afaik Alan never tried to mispresent this fact. He often even used Vitaly as an excuse to not fix bugs in the deep compiler ("Vitaly was a lot smarter than me" :-) 195.240.215.207 (talk) 08:10, 12 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I am not saying that Allan Mertner misrepresented any facts. It's just that the article states wrongly, that VP was designed by him. I was one of the developers of version 2.0/2.1 so I should know. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.78.34.122 (talk) 17:31, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Mertner's reasons about not going free software path

That whole list requires citations. Otherwise it looks like merely as weakly-sourced pretext. And it probably is, but readers need to know that for sure. Personally, i tried to join Mertner's community on the ning.com to shed some light on that matter but has been deleted "to combat spam", heh. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.140.240.108 (talk) 21:13, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See wayback engine last webpage (the last pargraph of the webpost where he throws the towel) and the old VP maillist. There were some large discussions after both stops. I summarized them based on my own copy of the mail archives and non public private communication with Allan (during the revamp attempt in 2005 when they tried to setup a community anyway, I assisted in migrating FPC code for the encumbered pieces of code (sysutils and classes))

For the most I agreed with Mertner, since there were hardly any capable people in the community that could pulls something off. And I have a copy of the source code, it is truly unmaintainable. 88.159.71.34 (talk) 10:10, 13 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]