Archive for May 2010

ClassType field should not be “magic”

I’ve been doing some work with code generation recently. It’s kind of messy. You need to build a tree in memory of objects that represent various types of syntax for the language you’re generating code for. You have to think inside-out from the way you normally write code, since you’re creating it in logical tree form, not in line form.

You have a base class that represents any code-generation object, and a bunch of classes that descend from it.  In order to manage things properly, you’re likely to have TList<TCodegenObject> and TStack<TCodegenObject> collections (or, worse still, non-generic TObjectList and TObjectStack containers) all over the place.  But TCodegenObject, like TObject, is an abstract base class that you only instantiate descendants of.
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I think I just got sponsored

A couple days ago, I got an email from a member of the AnyDAC dev team.  They make a set of professional data-access components for Delphi, and they’re looking for feedback and publicity.  They were willing to give me a free license, worth about $400, if I’d take the time to evaluate their components, provide some feedback and suggestions, and write up a few reviews on here.  Apparently they’re particularly interested in getting some focus on their in-memory dataset, DatS, which isn’t documented particularly well and doesn’t get used much. Continue reading ‘I think I just got sponsored’ »

Going to DelphiLive! again.

This time last year, I was getting ready to take a plane down to California to attend the DelphiLive! conference, where I’d been invited to speak about developing games in Delphi.  This year, it’s been pushed back a few months, to be held in late August instead of mid-May, and I just now got the acceptance email from the organizers.  Looks like I’ll be presenting two sessions this year: “Using extended RTTI to make your life easier,” and “Game engine development in Delphi.”

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