Joseph MItzen

Except ethics. And GDPR.

And yet... now I am very afraid.

Not really. Its website today is the same as when I used it 15 years ago; it still touts its number one selling point as the fact that it's a "BDE replacement". This db has "SQL 92 compatibility" in 2021. It has no window functions, common table expressions or other modern SQL features that you can get in something like SQLite (and once you use those, you never want to go back!). Its interface is the old TDataset style , e.g. https://www.componentace.com/help/absdb_manual/usingparametersinqueries.htm or even worse https://www.componentace.com/help/absdb_manual/addingnewrecords.htm. I'm not sure it's added anything since I last used it in 2005. Their news page seems to suggest I'm right: https://www.componentace.com/info/news.php Major update in 2008, one new feature added by 2010. Supposedly a major update in 2012 but it doesn't list any changes and there's no changelog or version history because, again, it's like it's still 1999 on the website. Every Absolute Database update seems to be a "minor upgrade". The fact that it still supports Delphi 4 suggests it doesn't incorporate any modern (or not-so-modern) Delphi features either. They also have three articles about why you'd want to replace the BDE with this, suggesting they haven't updated their marketing since circa 1999. Seriously, here's a web archive snapshot from 2005 and you can see nothing's changed: https://web.archive.org/web/20050807080939/https://www.componentace.com/ I know this community tends to fetishize proprietary software, but seriously this is an obscure db whose reason for existence was to replace the Borland Database Engine, which is long gone. There's no reason for it to exist today and you're not going to get anything for your $299 (software + source code) that you can't get for free, except perhaps grey hair from having to wait so long to finish your queries. EDIT: Good lord, under support they still list a FAX number and "ComponentAce is a Borland and CodeGear Technology Partner".

I used Absolute Database a long time ago, so this might have changed, but.... ...it was SLOW. Incredibly slow. Queries that ran instantaneously in dbs like FireBird took many seconds to run in Absolute. In fact I recently ran across one of my old programs compiled with Absolute Database and ran it on a modern CPU and... yes, it wasn't my imagination. Still unbelievably slow on a system that has to be at least six times faster than the one the code was originally written for. I don't think SQLite needs an alternative; it hasn't become the most-used database in the world for no reason. Hence, there's no reason to look at Absolute Database for your embedded database needs. And for (almost) everything else, there's PostgreSQL. Unless your needs are incredibly exotic, these two can match or surpass any other solution for free.

What if it was trained solely from the contents of @Arnaud Bouchez 's hard drive?

I've never encountered anyone except Delphi users who develop inside VMs. Seriously, no one else. I'm not sure why you'd want to do it either. You're going to end up with less RAM, slower CPU, slower disk access, and the need to maintain two OSes now. I can understand testing in a VM where isolation and reproducibility are important, but I don't understand the advantages of using a VM for development. Honestly, it might have something to do with how hard it's been historically to get a Delphi development environment set up (or upgraded).

On Linux with KVM one can reserve hardware for the VM to have dedicated access to. On my home desktop I finally got this set up correctly so that a Windows VM has exclusive access to an old second video card I stuck in the machine. I was able to run some 3D games in the VM essentially as well as the old card could before under native Windows. I hooked the card's output to the second input on my monitor and can toggle back and forth between fullscreen Linux and fullscreen Windows with hardware GPU. 🙂 The keyboard and mouse can be toggled between systems and the sound is virtualized although one could also dedicate these to the VM too if they have the extra hardware. I *think* it's possible to configure things under some circumstances to automatically switch graphics cards such that, say, Linux boots with the newer graphic card but when the VM runs Linux gets the old card and the VM gets the better one, but I haven't tried this yet. If possible, it's not exactly easy.

I don't believe it was about running Hyper-V on desktop Linux so much as being able to replace all but Hyper-V's micro-kernel with Linux (aka "Linux as the root partition"). It doesn't look like the user space patches have landed yet to allow actually creating virtual machines with it. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-Linux-Root-Partition

IEEE754 dictates exceptions? <Should know better than to question David Heffernan; checks and finds out it's true.> Wow. Interesting. Apparently several other languages ignore this... Python, Ruby and Perl all raised the same exception for either case when I just tried them. PHP returned INF or NaN and only issued a warning (good old frightening PHP). I guess my hat's off to Guido Van Rossum, Yukihiro Matsumoto and Larry Wall for doing the sensible thing rather than the "right" thing. As usual, Rasmus Lerdorf manages to zig when he should zag. 🙂 Also, I now formally declare my allegiance to Unums, which only have two exception types.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format)

OK, let me try this then... Vandrovnik's code example raised different exceptions depending upon whether 0 / 0 or 1 / 0 was attempted, with no exceptions masked or calls to outside libraries. MDagg seemed to be justifying this because of the two returning different results. In that context I felt that they should both have raised a "division by zero" exception since that was what was attempted in both cases, regardless of returned value. And that's all I have to say on the subject lest I start thinking that 7 * 13 = 28....

And for Ahaan Sharma it's not a problem at all.

What I meant to say was that if an exception is called "division by zero" it should be raised for any division by zero or else renamed.

Today I learned 1 / 0 is "complex infinity". Perhaps I should have written "If an exception is called 'division by zero' it should be raised for any division by zero regardless of the numerator otherwise its name is misleading." I just checked and SymPy live gives the same complex infinity symbol for 1 / 0 while CoCalc & SageCell (powered by SageMath) raises a traditional "rational division by zero" exception for each. Wolfram and SymPy seem to be more math-oriented while SageMath is more programming-oriented I guess.

Division by zero is division by zero, whether it's 0 / 0 or 1 / 0.

I never use any RegEx in my code.

If you're using the version of Python bundled with your Linux distro, you should either install NumPy from the Linux distro's package manager, use the "--user" option to install the package in the user's home directory (making sure the path is adjusted accordingly) or install into a virtual environment. Otherwise you could have problems with the distro package manager and pip conflicting. The distro package manager won't know pip installed NumPy to the system directory and could end up overwriting it in the future during an install or update.

It was like a one step forward, one step back situation: I believe they removed FireDAC from Professional at the same time they added Mobile support to it.

Honest question - you pay $500 and then $250 a year to use an open source database, with none of that money going back to the database project itself?

That depends on the database and the version. For instance, in PostgreSQL < 9.2, a count(*) query would have to perform a sequential scan through the database: MS SQL Server, and now PostgreSQL, can often do index-only scans in situations like this, for much quicker results.

They're modern classes in essentially every way except inheritance. I imagine they did this to get around the memory management issues with the standard classes. Heck, even Niklaus Wirth in the past has suggested that objects are just Pascal records with methods. 🙂

But what happens now that Embarcadero has been turning records into classes?

When did they hire a Java developer to name things?

Honestly, if I ran the idea of paying $149 to be able to display an SVG file to any programming forum outside of this one, I guarantee you the reaction would not be positive. I've always said, "Make money with Delphi, not from Delphi". A survey of developers found that the number one reason they gave for choosing a language for a project was the number of libraries available for it (and preferably open source ones). When the Delphi community tries to charge for things that are free everywhere else, it just makes it that much less likely that someone will choose Delphi in the future. The barrier to entry is raised that much higher.

And yet, that's the way the software world has headed towards. Open source is more than just good for "social collaboration", it's good for producing secure, reliable code at a potential pace that far outstrips what any commercial vendor can produce (e.g. the Linux kernel has more contributors than even Microsoft can devote to its own kernel).

Damn, even floating points have to wear masks right now.