[Lazarus] Please define "delphi compatibility"

[waldo kitty]

On 10/10/2012 14:31, Deon de Wet-Roos wrote:
> I'm a chemist in South Africa and I'm trying to start a new line in
> programming.  I started out with Delphi 4 and being  a poor chemist I
> thought Lazarus was the answer to my programming needs.  I cannot afford to
> fork out thousands of Rands for a new programming language and besides
> Pascal was the language I grew up with at varsity.  Can any of you guru's
> advise me what the best option is? I like Delphi and made my first US$ 10
> 000 using Delphi 4.  I'd like to continue with Lazarus and pay a donation
> for everything I earn using lazarus.  However it seems there are many ego's
> involved with the development of lazarus and that makes me jittery.  If
> Lazarus is not the best cross platform programming language then what is?
> In South Africa we don't have the luxury of pensions and I'll have to work
> until I die.  My idea is to develop technical solutions to companies in C++,
> Pascal and Matlab but if I cannot count on Lazarus what must I do?

lazarus is "simply" a programing environment for the pascal language as 
developed and implemented by the FPC and lazarus groups... lazarus' main 
offering is a GUI environment with RAD methods by which you can drop components 
onto a pallet and generate programs... some of us use other editors instead of 
lazarus... some of us use all custom code instead of any pregenerated library 
objects you drop on the pallet... some of us are still trying to wrap their 
heads around this whole GUI thing...

don't worry about the egos involved... we all have them... instead, concentrate 
on your tasks at hand and use what you feel is the best tool for the job... 
since you know pascal and have used delphi, using FPC and lazarus isn't all that 
much of a change ;)

yeah, i'm just another FPC/Lazarus newbie and have been for several years ;)