DelphiDabbler's Blog

I've just released v4.19.0 of CodeSnip. You can get it from GitHub . For the low down see the announcement on the CodeSnip blog.

Embarrassed face emoji! Following the release of v2.1.0 of the Code Snippets Database  a few days ago, I've just run CodeSnip in the debugger only to find it was detecting and gently ignoring some errors when loading the release! So I've rushed out a hotfix: v2.1.1. If you followed my advise a few days back and updated to v2.1.0, you really need to get this hotfix. Grab it from the project's GitHub release page for hotfix 2.1.1 . Whoops!

Just completed v2.1.0 of the Code Snippets Database collection . This version tidies up the meta-data to make it more consistent and to leave behind some old legacy data that dates back to the CodeSnip program's early days. Also fixed some minor bugs and updated a few descriptions. No new snippets though. I advise any CodeSnip users to update since future CodeSnip releases will probably drop backwards compatibility with the now deprecated v2.0.x file format. Information on how to update can be found from within CodeSnip by choosing the Database | Install or Update DelphiDabbler Snippets Database  menu option. You can get the new version and read the full change log on the project's GitHub release page .

UPDATE: all fine now. Difficulties with getting DelphiDabbler.com back on line are getting worse. Now,  you may be seeing this page if you try to access either delphidabbler.com or  delphidabbler.github.io: Firstly, I've not  surrended the domain name, and I haven't forgotten to pay the bills! I still own it. This problem affects delphidabbler.github.io because I've changed it to map to delphidabbler.com . The problem is therefore with the delphidabbler.com domain and could be one of two issues: The change I made to the nameservers to reference GitHub Pages seems to be propagating very slowly  or There's a problem at my domain hosting company - there's a DNS error being reported that I don't understand and that I'm trying to get tech support to address. Unfortunately it looks like the site won't be available for at least another 24 to 48 hrs. Could even be worse if the suspected DNS problem is real and can't be resolved easily. Watch this space. F...

UPDATE: all fine now Following on from yesterday's post I have decided to move DelphiDabbler.com to a new server. Since I develop the website on GitHub, and the site is to all intents and purposes mirrored on GitHub I'm changing my DNS record to use delphidabbler.com as custom domain for https://delphidabbler.github.io. All the content is already there leaving me nothing left to move. While we're waiting for the changes to propagate, https://delphidabbler.com & https://www.delphidabbler.com (and their http:// equivalents) could lead you to either the old or new servers. You can tell which because pages served from the old server have a great big yellow warning displayed at the top of each page, while pages served from GitHub Pages don't have the warning (but may have a red cookie message pop up). Help Needed If, by 12:00 UTC tomorrow (2021/12/11) you're still seeing the old server, I would be very grateful if you would let me know, either by commenting below, o...

UPDATE: all fine now. I'm experiencing problems at the delphidabbler.com web server (404 errors where none existed previously, for e.g.) and cannot contact the hosting company to try to resolve it. Until I can sort out a new host, please use the mirror site at https://delphidabbler.github.io/ I may end up pointing delphidabbler.com at the GitHub Pages site permanently if I can't resolve this issue. Watch this space.

One of the things that pleases me no end about Pascal , like Algol before it, is its use of =  to mean = , and  not  as an assignment operator. For that we have := . Dunno if it's my maths background, but I find languages that use the equals sign as an assignment operator to be really, really annoying. Now good old BASIC gets it right, in that it uses  =  to test for equality but combines =  with the  LET  prefix for assignment. As in : LET x = 42 You know, just like you do in maths . Except that many BASIC implementations make LET  optional! But in the curly brace languages (and others), the misuse of =  irritates me beyond reason. Especially so when they then go and define == to mean "is equal to" when there's a perfectly good = sign just begging to be used. I find this ridiculous - and I'm in good company: A notorious example for a bad idea was the choice of the equal sign to denote assignment. It goes back to Fortran in 1957...

Last week I noticed that accessing any of the articles on DelphiDabbler.com from the Articles menu resulting in a 404 error on the main site, while everything was OK on the GitHub Pages mirror I use for testing. I hate to imagine how long it had been broken. Anyhow a simple tweak to the .htaccess file seems to have fixed things. A forced page refresh may be needed if the error persists.