What's New -  November, 2013

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November 2, 2013: I received three emails in October which have led me to consider upgrading from Delphi 7  to the current version, Delphi XE5.   See 2013 Delphi Upgrade Plans for details.

November 10, 2013:  I purchased my XE5 upgrade last week so the learning curve is taking an upward turn.  Two postings this week implement the first updates.  Testing Delphi Versions now includes the conditional Version names through XE5 and suggests and even better way to automatically change the source code based on compiler version.  (Hint: it uses the global constant "computerversion".)

BigIntsTest V2.1 is the big integers test program I was working on to display the internal representation of digits of large integers at the request of a user trying to understand how it works.  The download includes a new version the big  integers unit which should compile successfully for any Delphi versions after Delphi 5.

 November 17, 2013:  BigIntsTest V2.2  and UBigIntsV4 posted today  include the first significant use of features not available in Delphi 7. "Operator overloads"  allow us to write arithmetic and comparison operations for big integers much the same as we write for normal integers.  The best news is that both old and new versions are supported in single source code images for the unit and the test program. 

November 24, 2013:  ComboTest Version 2.0, our combinatorial calculator; posted today has a minor, but significant, change to allow larger, 64-bit, sample sizes to be analyzed.  The change was motivated by request from a college professor simulating a draw of 5 items from a set of 500 values with replacement.  There are more that 285 billion ways to do this.  The built in Random function in Delphi tops out  around 4 billion so I implemented a 64 bit Random Number Generator to allow generating random samples  from the 285 billion possibilities.  Changes to several DFF library programs were required to implement this.