Other than in my home country Germany, Cheques still play a big role here in Malaysia. Its been a pain to fill them out and frequently there’s an error and trouble with the bank.
An idea was born, I need to write a software doing that job for us. Well I am more into PHP and other scripting, but not really a software developer. What can I use for such a project? I also would like to develop under Linux, but be able to run the ready product on Windows too. I know M$s Visual Studio, where I can easily drag some UI elements onto a form, add some code and here we go. So I was checking some .NET stuff on Linux and checked again Mono Develop out. It’s not bad, but the way you have to put UI elements into containers and so on, is a bit weird. But well, thats because of GTK.
Not really convinced, also keeping some other projects in mind where I mind need some rather weird components, I continued my search. I found – to my surprise – a open source “Delphi Version”, called Lazarus. The project looked quite mature to me and there is a great community behind it. I am also not a .NET fan and did something with Delphi in the 90ties, even learned Turbo Pascal at my vocational training 1991/1992 (at that time I was @home coding in C a bit). Back then I found Pascal a bit old fashioned, but with Delphi I remember it was a big deal and the greatest RAD tool at the time.
Utimately I went upstairs into my computer/hobby room and started to dig in my old stuff. And yes, I found my 20 years old Data Becker Turbo Pascal book. Already covering OOP stuff (need to catch more up with that), it was all of the sudden relevant again. So never throw old computer books, you never know!
The result of my first attempts are attached as a Delphi project. Just a little program, which would convert an amount into words. With the limitation of only going up to 999.999. It is also doing two figures after the comma. So it converts 113.40 into “one hundred thirteen and forty cent”.
