Although i have used visual basic 6 for quite a while, I am far from being an expert in the language and also I am only really starting out in Lazarus.
At first I thought that I was never going to like Lazarus it seemed too different.
I didn't like having the whole of the unit's code displayed. In VB I always preferred the procedure view. That probably puts me in a minority among even vb people though.
Anyway thanks to the help you and others gave me on
this thread I am a lot more comfortable now.
Also it was just a matter of acclimatising.
Now, I like the pascal language, if anything, it's a bit wordier than vb6, which itself is often criticised for being too verbose.
Pascal makes you do a lot more explicit conversions inttostr etc that vb6 handles for you. I like this though as it makes for safer code.
The syntactical differences are not that great really, I still forget to put in the semi colon a lot and I prefer vb's way of using the equals sign for both
assignment and equality but those are small things.
I have toyed with vb.net and despite the language similarities to vb6, somehow I feel more at home in Lazarus than vb.net.
The controls Lazarus and VB6 have in common seems to share the same names for their properties etc to a large extent and the syntax of the two languages is close enough
to make moving from one to the other fairly trivial from that point of view.
Also looking at the LFM file for a form, it's really similar the design part of a vb FRM file (see pic), the biggest difference being the use of pixels in Lazarus vs twips in vb which is a pretty
simple conversion.
I almost feel like I could write a convertor for my vb projects.
Then there's the facts that Lazarus is open source, under constant development and free as well!