User:Bart

Who Am I

Full name: Bart Broersma
Country of origin: The Netherlands.
What I do in real life: I am a health care professional working in a nursing home.

My homepage: http://home.tiscali.nl/~knmg0017 (it is in Dutch).
It has a general software section (Delphi and Lazarus) and FreePascal and Lazarus units.

Me and programming

In 1983, while I was a first year med student, I followed a summer course in programming in MUMPS (on a mini-computer). This was my first experience in programming.
It was not until 1991 that I had another encounter with a (Personal) Computer. This time at my very first job.
Soon I began reading books on DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, and I started writing WordPerfect macro's (in a really horrible language).
I saved up some money and bought a 286.
Then a friend gave me a copy of Turbo Pascal 3.0 and an introduction book on structural programming using Pascal.
As time past by I upgraded to TP 5.5, TP 6.0, Delphi 1 and Delphi 3.0.
Some of my early TP programs evolved along the way.
After Delphi 3 the new Delphi's became either to heavy for my machine (as I am writing this my machine is 11 years old), or they were just way too expensive for, what is only my hobby.

Then one day I learned about Lazarus in a Dutch magazine on Pascal programming (appropriately called Blaise) and I took a quick look. Lazarus then was appr. at version 0.9.16, and it was not very stable yet, so I left it for a while.
But I had also grown an interest in Linux, and of course wanted to program in Pascal there as well. So I came back again after some time, to find that progress was made steadily on, and from appr. 0.9.20 I jumped on board, this time to stay.

Since 0.9.26 Lazarus IMO outperforms Delphi 3.0 regarding available components (some of them unavailable in D3) and the IDE (in particular the codetools).
I now hardly ever use Delphi anymore, most of the time only to compare Delphi VCL/RTL behaviour against Lazarus/FreePascal.
I have grown so used to Lazarus that the Delphi 3 IDE now feels very sluggish and cumbersome to use. (OTOH, the Borland compiler/linker is still much faster, and integrated debugging is easier.)

Working with Lazarus, I have of course encountered bugs in both FreePascal and Lazarus. Many of these were in rather "basic" components, that make up most of my programs (it seems to me that many Pascal users do database applications and web-related stuff, and use lots of fancy controls, where most of my apps are just very basic).
And since not very many people seemed bothered by the bugs I encountered, I tried fixing them myself (with the help and support of many of the Lazarus community). The spirit of this Open Source project has caught me, and I find trying to contributing to it a very pleasant spending of my spare time.

My current goal for Lazarus :-)

To keep Fpc and Lazarus Windows98/WinME compatible.
I therefore implemented a replacement (and a very simple fallback) for WideStringManager.UpperWideStringProc and WideStringManager.LowerWideStringProc using the shlwapi.dll library. http://svn.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/trunk/packages/winunits-base/src/win9xwsmanager.pp?view=markup

Lazarus interests

Maintaining the MaskEdit unit.

Contributions

Just an impression, nothing to brag about.

Lazarus

• My very first contribution to Lazarus: TCustomSynEdit.SearchReplace function always returns 0
• My first serious contribution to Lazarus TFindDialog is broken was applied in revision 11490
• One major rewrite and several minor revisions of the maskedit unit.
• Fix setting TOpenDialog/TSaveDialog initialdir on WinVista and up
• Make MessageDlg default button work on Windows Vista and up
• Respect MessageDlg DefaultButton parameter if mbOk is displayed (in co-operation with Flávio Etrusco)
• Fixed TSaveDialog/TOpenDialog.Filter to change the file's extension when it's empty
• Added checkbox "Prompt on replace" to TReplaceDialog
• Wrote a simple Synedit Highlighter for po files
• Wrote a utility to check the validity of po language files
• My EPlus text-editor has been used as the base for LazEdit by Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho.
• Fix mrCancel and mbClose behavior in a MessageDlg
• Fix behaviour of TBitBtn with Kind=bkClose
• Implement customizable glyphs for TDBNavigator
• Implement Utf8 support for the MaskEdit unit
• Things assigned to me, open, fixed or otherwise.

FreePascal

• My very first patch for FreePascal: EInOutError.ErrorCode is always 0
• My first serious patch for FreePascal: StrToTime gives wrong result on invalid timestring, or chokes on it
• ForceDirectories() fails if directory is UNC path
• OLE automation errors
• GetLocaleFormatSettings() does not set locale for ListSeparator on Windows
• Don't add a thousands separator in FormatFloat if there are no digits before it because the value is too small

Things I would like to have in Lazarus/FreePascal

• A native ObjectPascal debugger