Hello,

I am Mario Donick, living in Rostock, Germany. Currently 28 years old. Here's a short history of my Pascal experiences:

I started programming in 1991 or 1992 with the BASIC dialect used on the East German home computer KC85/3. Later, in 1998 or so, I used the acquired basic knowledge to better understand Turbo Pascal, which was taught in computer classes at school.

We used Turbo Pascal for Windows in these days, but never dived into object oriented Windows programming; we simply used the WinCrt unit to create simple programs. My teacher luckily borrowed me all the TPW manuals, so I could learn it on my own. When I think back, it was really complicated, but I managed to get some decent things running.

Once school was over, I programmed less, and when I did, I used some obscure BASIC-like language called "Profan". It was very easy to create Windows programs with it, but after a while, I abandoned it, experimented with another strange dialect called wxBASIC (because it was capable of creating both Windows and Linux binaries from the same source), then came to Visual Studio 2005 (using BASIC again, not C#), and finally, in 2006, I found FreePascal.

Since then I'm working on my roguelike role playing game, called "LambdaRogue: The Book of Stars" (http://lambdarogue.net) It has grown to a rather mature game, its current version is 1.5.3, but as in many hobby projects, still with some bugs, and as in many roguelike projects, never really finished. The source of that game is a mess, too, and still only procedural, without objects (in 2008 I decided to create a 2.x rewrite of that game, but I never got very far with this, 'cause, well, it works.)

I never programmed for a living, though -- that would destroy the fun for me. In professional life, I'm working as a linguist/communication scientist at a university.

So, that's it -- long story, sorry.