That is the purpose of the get lazarus website, to make installing and customization easier.
Regarding variable declaration, part of the Free Pascal design is that you must declare things first before you can use them. Declaration must be separated from implementation code. This means you must all declare variables, with their types, before you use them in a statement.
var
S: string;
begin
WriteLn('Please enter you name:');
S := ReadLn();
WriteLn('Hello ' + S);
end;
>Regarding the installers, try this page that makes installing much easier
Ugh. So my choices are: use the installer, or build from source. How Linux of them.
You apparently don't get this, but I don't actually want an installer to make it "easy". I'd rather it be simple. Give me a damned zip file containing the program and its dependencies, and make the tools support relative paths (or environment variables). Is that too much to ask? Yes, apparently.
> Regarding variable declaration, part of the Free Pascal design is that you must declare things first before you can use them. Declaration must be separated from implementation code.
Yes, I know. That's precisely what I don't like about it. It disincentivizes using variables to hold intermediate values for clarity purposes.
> You apparently don't get this, but I don't actually want an installer to make it "easy". I'd rather it be simple. Give me a damned zip file containing the program and its dependencies, and make the tools support relative paths (or environment variables). Is that too much to ask? Yes, apparently.
Do you find that a lot of software on Windows conforms with the way you think software installation should work?
I see "portable" versions of software in zip files sometimes, but always pretty small apps. This kind of packaging probably peaked in popularity prior to the introduction of Windows Vista. In the UWP era things are only more likely to trend away from this.
Actually yes, most software does. Notable exceptions include a lot of Microsoft software, unfortunately. They used to be better about it but they've become exceptionally lazy about it lately. Unix culture's "hardcode all the paths" influence I expect.
And popular does not mean good. In fact, it is often the opposite.
> Notable exceptions include a lot of Microsoft software, unfortunately. They used to be better about it but they've become exceptionally lazy about it lately.
I don't believe I've ever used a Microsoft product that offered installation via zip files in addition to installer. What are some examples?
Oh, if that's what you meant then no, lots of stuff isn't offered that way (though a lot of stuff is, and when it isn't you can often just take installers from various software and open them with 7zip to extract their contents without issue). However the entire Sysinternals suite is portable, and old MS software would at least give you the option to install to any directory of your choosing (after which you could usually move it around without problems). Newer software from MS pretends that this is possible, but really often just installs a tiny portion of the software in the chosen path and dumps everything else into the hardcoded default one.
He literally told me nothing I didn't already demonstrate knowledge of in the post he replied to, implying he didn't actually read it. Providing "help" when you don't even take the time to understand the problem is not helping.
https://www.getlazarus.org/setup/?download
That is the purpose of the get lazarus website, to make installing and customization easier.
Regarding variable declaration, part of the Free Pascal design is that you must declare things first before you can use them. Declaration must be separated from implementation code. This means you must all declare variables, with their types, before you use them in a statement.