corneliusdavid

There is 0.01% chance of that happening. There are still many parts of today's IDE similar to Delphi 1 from 30 years ago and even Borland Pascal before that. Some of the same hot keys and many of the sub-windows in the IDE. There are often additions and incremental changes and subtle (and not so subtle) ways of interacting but there's just too much that would need to be re-tested if they made a huge interface change. The Welcome Page has been where the bulk of the "pull the rug out from under you" changes have taken place and that's not a critical part of the daily programming task.

There's a key phrase in the explanatory text for this problem: "The asteroids are much smaller than they appear on the map, and every asteroid is exactly in the center of its marked position." So if we assume a scale like a baseball field is the square area and a golf ball in the very middle is the asteroid, then the only time an asteroid would block the view from another asteroid is if there is a DIRECT line through it; in other words, only vertical, horizontal or diagonal lines crossing another asteroid. Therefore, any asteroid whose view angle to another asteroid does not fit that is assumed to be visible. And therefore, yes, I believe this is correct.

Even if some tricky function were called to return the number of characters in a string, at some lowest point, there would still need to be an iterator to check each character. The only thing I'd say about your code is you have an unnecessary variable (ch) and character assignment (ch := s[c]). I suppose one "trick" to make your code shorter would be to replace all periods with blanks leaving a line with just hashtags; then you could simply get the Length of the line to get the count of asteroids in that line, something like this (not tested): s := StringReplace(m1.Lines.Strings[r], '.', '', [rfReplaceAll]); Inc(ac, s.Length);

LOL! No worries. Now it makes sense. I found Day 10 of 2024 to be fairly simple. It's one of the few I actually completed both parts 1 and 2. I haven't had time to finish 2024 nor look at any prior years.

Day 10 (of AoC 2024) is about trailheads, not asteroids. Are you looking at a different day or year?

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Got it! Can't wait to dive into it and trust it'll be as good as your other books. Some of the chapter titles look like they'll provide good arguments to support the best practices I'm trying to promote to my team. Thanks, Dalija!

LOL! That's a great new use for AI coding--use the generated code as a challenge for others to figure out what's wrong!

I used ChatGPT a year ago. Then I heard about Claude and started using that with much better success so signed up for a web account. Then Delphi 12.2 added AI, so I added that but mostly for testing and demo purposes. I haven't used it very much yet but it does work and is kinda slick to highlight some code and have it explain it to you. I plan to use the integrated Claude with a few projects I inherited in the near future. So far, the web version is easier to use, partly because the interface in Delphi is brand new and doesn't dock well or remember it's position. You can drag-and-drop units to the web version and copy generated code so it's not difficult to use. I'm sure improvements are coming for AI integration in future versions of Delphi so my opinions may change.

I'll second both previous comments. I'm helping my team upgrade a suite of old programs that used a mix of grids and controls; the new version is DevExpress Quantum grids to the mix. We wanted to support a "dark" mode and it took a lot of research to get everything to look decent together--or at least close. We had to pick both a VCL style and a DevEx skin that (mostly) work together. They're saved and applied in completely different ways.

RTTI

I taught myself a new language a couple of years ago, so I think I understand where you're coming from. When I learn a new language, I want to focus only on the language and what it can do, control loops, data structures, functions, parameters, etc. Having to learn event-driving programming and why you should use a TActionList hooked to a button instead of a button click, or which comes first, FormShow or FormActivate, ... all that stuff will become important down the road but how do you just declare a variable and assign a value? And what data types are there? Getting stuck with a tutorial that jumps immediately into GUI programming can be frustrating. I don't have a good book selection for you but I recently wrote a bunch of console programs to solve programming puzzles for Advent of Code. You could look through those as examples if you want. They use a variety of constructs; I learn best by example so these may (or may not) be useful.

When was that? I have a book written by Bill Gates in 1995 called "The Road Ahead" where he talks a lot about the Internet being the next revolution in communication and technology. He clearly saw it's benefit 30 years ago

Delphi 12.3 has not yet been released. The AI integration in 12.2 was the first version and will certainly be improved as this new frontier is explored further and they receive feedback. I build plug-ins and integrations for an old 32-bit retail POS system. There's still a LOT of 32-bit apps out there--and they work just fine. Delphi turns 30 next month. VCL is (mostly) a wrap-around for Windows API functions. Someone with more in-depth knowledge than I may chime in but my understanding is that there are so many apps out there already that rely on the VCL the way it is that changing anything would break a lot of stuff. Instead, people can create new apps using FireMonkey or use any of the several third-party GUI component sets that take advantage of new capabilities.

I haven't had time to get past #11, which I rewrote using a recursive function for part 2 but then found out that was foolish--I killed it after letting it run for 24 hours! My favorite (so far) was #3; if you know regular expressions, it was snap. I hope to have some time over the holidays to tackle a few more.