Lazarus
Free Pascal => General => Topic started by: led76 on April 15, 2014, 02:43:35 pm
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Dear all,
I am a Computer science teacher and each year I have many students (aged 13-18) participating in the greek national programming contest. As a pascal fan myself I have always insisted on teaching pascal for this is the best options for beginners + it is a great option for more advanced students/programmers.
My only other serious option is C++ (because of the STL). Everything works well when i use pascal for beginners, every year that is. But when a student is getting better he/she has to proceed to C++ because of not having the same tools as STL provides to a C++ user. Very few to none of the top coders use pascal in the national programming contests and the International Olympiad in Informatics.
This is a huge loss of time. Instead of focusing on algorithms and data stractures they have to study C++, STL.
I believe that a great step forward the acceptance of Free Pascal in Education can be the development of the fcl-stl library. As I believe it is preinstalled in the 2.7. versions. When there will be a stable version for this? Is there any fcl-stl manual? The organizers of the International Olympiad in Informatics (this year held in Taiwan) can be formaly informed about this, a press release maybe as well? Also for the next academic year every major national programming contest organization should be informed too I believe. If there is anyone that has any ideas of how can I help in the development of this project please tell me so.
cheers,
Dinos, Greece
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Anyone?
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FCL-STL is already pre-installed with stable Free Pascal versions. It comes with Lazarus and is to be found in the fpcsrc packages. There is also documentation included in form of TeX files.
A very short overview of FCL-STL is provided in the Free Pascal wiki (http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Data_Structures,_Containers,_Collections), but it clearly deserves some extension and reworking.
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Here is a pdf of the creators of the fcl-stl Vladimír BOŽA, Michal FORIŠEK I'm attaching it because I do not remember where I got it from and I would rather not spend time searching for it.
As you will understand your self it was design so it can be used on olympiad from the start.
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Thanks for providing this interesting paper. It has originally been published in volume 6 of the journal Olympiads in Informatics that is available in full text from http://www.mii.lt/olympiads_in_informatics/ (http://www.mii.lt/olympiads_in_informatics/).
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Is there any fcl-stl manual?
Plz take a look at file: FPC\packages\fcl-stl\doc\main.pdf
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fcl-stl in current stable fpc versions are shipped in source, but not compiled, because the compiler support was incomplete (you can actually use most of the generics feature, as long as you don't rely on enumerator). The next major/minor version should perhaps include properly supported fcl-stl. I see that this is indeed limitation because programming contests won't use development version of a development tool but there's not much option now. The danger of forcing it in a local/national contest would be that in the international one the provided version might not be the same, thus the package would be missing. For list, stack and queue there's a pointer and object based implementation in classes and contnrs unit. The only missing important data structure IMO is only (hash)map and probably priority queue.
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Thanks everyone.
I really hope that the next major/minor version of freepascal (lazarus is not a programming contest IDE) includes properly supported fcl-stl, already compiled. Does anybody know how I could ask for this and who are the members of the community that could help?
One last question, is there anyone that works on the development of the fcl-stl? Hashmaps and priority queues are very useful tools, if there is a way to add them on the library, this would be more than great.
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Does anybody know how I could ask for this and who are the members of the community that could help?
I don't think you need to ask, it will be since the trunk the support is available already, just have to wait for the next release (which could be long). If you want to speed it up, fix the bugs and implement missing functionalities set as milestones for 2.8 and/or 3.0. You can ask development team in the mailing list about what's missing.
One last question, is there anyone that works on the development of the fcl-stl? Hashmaps and priority queues are very useful tools, if there is a way to add them on the library, this would be more than great.
See the history yourself: http://svn.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/trunk/packages/fcl-stl/
Hashmaps and priority queues are already there
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thanks for everything, i will give it a go