How can my software know when a LX200 has finished slewing?

On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:43:27 +0000 (UTC), Pierre Vandevenne
wrote:

While we don't use Delphi for our programs either, I am thankful "Cartes du
Ciel"'s author - among others - remains unaware of the language intrinsic
worthlesness ;-)

Heck, I didn't say it was worthless- just based on a lame language that
is a pain to use. Wasn't it Turning who demonstrated just how little it
takes to solve any problem algorithmically? But just because it can be
done, that doesn't mean you necessarily want to do it in a certain way.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Hi Chris

To be honest, I like Pascal because of the strong typing. It encourages
better programming and I definately prefer it to C or C++ which I find
a real pain to use. Delphi is even better.

How would I open a serial port that would be easier to port to Linux?

Andrew

On 4 Jul 2005 20:27:07 -0700, "CarnMeynen"
wrote:

Hi Chris

To be honest, I like Pascal because of the strong typing. It encourages
better programming and I definately prefer it to C or C++ which I find
a real pain to use. Delphi is even better.

How would I open a serial port that would be easier to port to Linux?

Languages like Delphi and Visual Basic include object libraries to
provide access to serial ports. The problem is that you don't
necessarily know what the code is doing; things like removing nulls or
trapping certain characters isn't unusual. C is a little closer to the
hardware, and is generally better documented in terms of how it handles
serial ports and data streams. Obviously, if you want to port your code
to Linux writing it in C is going to be helpful. At a low level, Windows
and Linux handle character I/O in a similar fashion, treating the serial
port as a virtual file. You could consider accessing the serial port via
OS calls, although that can be tricky from a high level language. Are
you planning on porting the Delphi app to Linux keeping it Delphi, or
translating it to something else?

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:43:27 +0000 (UTC), Pierre Vandevenne
wrote:

While we don't use Delphi for our programs either, I am thankful "Cartes du
Ciel"'s author - among others - remains unaware of the language intrinsic
worthlesness ;-)

Heck, I didn't say it was worthless- just based on a lame language that
is a pain to use. Wasn't it Turning who demonstrated just how little it
takes to solve any problem algorithmically? But just because it can be
done, that doesn't mean you necessarily want to do it in a certain way.

ITYM Turing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing-complete

But strongly typed languages are much better when lives are at stake or
for mission critical systems. You can't afford to have gratuitous blue
screens then. Far better to have programmers typos and common errors
detected at compile time than turn it into code that is guaranteed to
crash in obscure ways later. Industry chose another path. We all pay the
price.

PASCAL is only one example of a family of strongly typed languages. It
was imperfect. Algol68 was cute and very powerful in its day. Modula2
solved most of the flaws in Pascal and I think remains one of only a
handful of languages with a full formal verified specification. Ada went
beyond that but military involvement made it overly complex in the end.
Ultra high reliability software now has to use a cunning subset of the
Ada language.

Sadly business users prefer bloated software with huge numbers of bogus
features they don't use and crashes regularly. You would be amazed how
easy it is for a team of monkeys to churn out code that will get through
a C compiler. I have seen far too much production C code riddled with
errors that defensive static analysis tools could find (if only they
were run). And to be fair C++ compilers have improved a lot in this
respect. At least these days a dying MS Office Application no longer
takes the OS down with it (most times). FX: crosses fingers

I would personally prefer to catch errors at compile time whenever
possible YMMV.

Regards,
Martin Brown

Martin Brown wrote:
PASCAL is only one example of a family of strongly typed languages. It
was imperfect. Algol68 was cute and very powerful in its day. Modula2
solved most of the flaws in Pascal and I think remains one of only a
handful of languages with a full formal verified specification. Ada went
beyond that but military involvement made it overly complex in the end.
Ultra high reliability software now has to use a cunning subset of the
Ada language.

When I TA'd a class in programming languages, I called it a KSL: a
Kitchen Sink Language.

I would personally prefer to catch errors at compile time whenever
possible YMMV.

Hard to believe anyone would think otherwise, but you never know.

Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt

Well, I have Delphi Studio which includes Kylix, a version of Delphi
for LInux. But at the moment I'm having difficulty getting a hybrid
application to work. It is a stupid simple problem and there is
probably a workaround or patch.

Also, I can't get Kylix to install on Ubuntu, so I'm going to download
the libraries required by Kylix, I think it is possible to have several
versions of the same library under Linux.

Andrew

Hi Bob

Well the problem has been fixed by increasing the buffer sizes in
setupcomm and now works with XP.

Which leaves the # response problem.

Andrew

"CarnMeynen" wrote in
ups.com:

Also, I can't get Kylix to install on Ubuntu, so I'm going to download

fwiw, there was some obscure readme detailing a solution to installation
problems on some distros, don't remember much more though. Make sure you
read everything.

--
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