Free Pascal 2.2 Has Been Released

Daniel Mantione writes "Free Pascal 2.2 has been released. Several new platforms are supported, like the Mac OS X on Intel platform, the Game Boy Advance, Windows CE and 64-Windows. Free Pascal is now the first and only free software compiler that targets 64-bit Windows. These advancements were made possible by Free Pascal's internal assembler and linker allowing support for platforms not supported by the GNU binutils. The advancement in internal assembling and linking also allow faster compilation times and smaller executables, increasing the programmer comfort. Other new features are stabs debug support, many new code optimizations, resourcestring smart-linking and more."

Mixed Reaction....

[chefmonkey]

Half of me is saying "cool!"

The other half is looking very confused and asking "why?"

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[TheRaven64]

The other half is looking very confused and asking "why?"

The last time I played with Free Pascal was as an undergraduate, doing coursework that was meant to be done in Delphi. At the time, Free Pascal supported all of the features of Delphi required to complete the assignment. I wonder how much orphaned legacy Delphi code there is out there looking for a support route.

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[Dunbal]

I wonder how much orphaned legacy Delphi code there is out there looking for a support route.

      OMG, powerful alliteration and anthropomorphism. Here I am with a visual image of a young code snippet out in the winter cold, begging people for a couple pence for a "cuppa tea".

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[maxume]

You're mixed up on what alliteration is.

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are you calling alliterate?

You probly can't even read good either.

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[Nazlfrag]

Assuming alliterations are always apparent admits absence of afterthought. Learn that linguistics leverage lost lines, lest ye languish. Parent poster presumably postulated the Pascal premise presuppositionally. Defined, 'I wonder how much orphaned legacy Delphi code there is out there looking for a support route.' distinctly diverges to 'Does destitute Delphi data desire duplicate development designs?'

Mod parent up

[chefmonkey]

Bravo.

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[fm6]

The "support route" requires more than. a compiler. It requires developers who know both the technology and culture, which are drastically different from those of any other language. Not bad, just different. Which is why Turbo/Delphi/Object/Free Pascal has always been fiercely opposed by management (which doesn't care for nonstandard technology) and fiercely defended by developers (who love its tiny compile cycle and elegant features).

The suits will win in the end, because they're breeding faster. There's not a lot of incentive to become a Pascal expert, because it's perceived as a fringe language. (To some extent, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that doesn't make it any less true.) So there will be fewer and fewer developers who insist on working in Pascal, and always the same number of managers who insist on switching to a "standard" language.

So Pascal is doomed. Yes, they've been saying that for a long time, because it's been true for a long time. Religions don't die quickly.

Personal note: I used to work for Borland and was responsible for documenting a big chunk of the Delphi API. Fell in love with the language during those years. Driven out by the sheer insanity of Borland management. Now I can't bear to work in the language — too depressing.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

Your post is right on the money, but maybe I'm biased. While my first language was interpreted BASIC, my first compiled procuedural language was ... Turbo Pascal 3.02a. It was also my first OOP language, or, more correctly, Turbo Pascal 5.5 was. I yearn for the days of that Borland compiler ... it was FAST, and it generated small, highly-optimized executables -- well before anyone else did.

I've used Free Pascal for the odd project here or there, but, well, sadly, these days I find myself mostly using C a

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[fm6]

it was FAST

First bug report for Kylix (Linux version of Delphi): testers claimed the "compile" command wasn't doing anything. What they didn't understand was that their test programs were finishing compilation before they had a chance to release the mouse button!

Thing is with Pascal: it's designed to be very easy to compile. (So CS students could use it for their first stab at writing a compiler; this was before grammar generators made hand-built compilers obsolete.) So compiling only takes one pass, and even that pass executes quickly. Very handy when you're working with an IDE....

Ach. Getting depressed again.

Re:

[stoolpigeon]

those must have been the testers who actually got kylix to work. i never could, and i don't think i was alone. kylix died before it ever got out of the gate.

Re:

[Micah]

Huh. It worked fine for me on the platforms it supported (Red Hat 7 or 8 I think). Later when I tried to run it under Gentoo it failed miserably.

That's about when I decided: Closed source compilers: Never Again!!!

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[sg_oneill]

It was doomed, because Borland completely and dramatically misunderstood Linux. We ALL (Well the delphi heads) *WANTED* kylix, and we all collectively where sporting boners when told it 'did' GPL.

What we instead got was a buggy product that appeared to have alot of winelib in it (what the heck was that font thing?), and more to the point, it treated the GPL as if it was shareware. If one got the 'open source' version, which wasn't actually open source, we could make 'gpl' programs only, but by GPL, it meant "Well your program is GPL, but we are going to force a splash screen on your program that says its gpl and suggest updating to the full version." That was insulting as hell, and completely wrote it all off as an option for us.

Borlands problem is the attentiveness it paid the low-end and hobbyist market in the turbo days was completely blown out the window by the time it moved to Kylix. Hobbyists, students and small business MUST be paid attention to, or how the hells a kid supposed to learn your platform. Linux still has a large hobbyist contingent motoring it along, and in fact proved that hobbyist gift culture could power industry and commerce too.

What was really hard, was Delphi coders understood open source well. We loved sites like torry.ru that had huge collections of awesome open source librarys we could mash into our stuff to make our work days easier. In return we often packaged up our own little inventions and put them out there for other coders to use. Thats why we where so excited about kylix. What a let down.

Now of course we are being enticed back in with the 'turbo explorers' ('Hey kids! Its free!').

Except one cant install open source libraries by design. Way to piss on the Fanbase Borland!. Its a shame too. I was looking forward to returning to Delphi after all those years. Us hobbyists are still out in the cold.

I just hope people put some support into finally getting Lazarus and Free Pascal 'finished'. Its 95% there, and when that happens, we can finally tell the boss to cancel that Borland subscription, because coders *hate* being taken for granted.

Re:

[fm6]

A better VB for linux.

This was a marketing ploy that always bothered me. I was the only one at Borland who actually had serious VB experience, and the notion that skills in that environment were transferable to Object Pascal was absurd.

I couldn't get simple projects I tried out myself to run without it crashing on a regular basis. I would have stuck with it, but Borland gave up even faster than I did.

Your experience was different from mine. I'm very curious what was different about your system, but I d

Re:

[RichardKaufmann]

Pascal was defined after grammar generators (e.g. yacc) were around. Pascal was fun to compile because one could write a recursive descent parser for it straight off the "railroad diagrams" used to define the language. In fact, the ETH "P2" compiler (written by Urs Ammann) was such a compiler, and was the start of many other compilers. If I remember correctly, LL(1) is a proper subset of recursive-descent-able. Most everyone else uses LALR(1), which is not.

You probably should have said "easier and faste

Re:

[fm6]

Uh, dude, Pascal, C, Fortran, and Ada are very different languages. Borland's Pascal is the only one of these with delegates and built in OOP support. C is the only one with type-aware pointers. Fortran is a relic of the 50s. And Ada is a world onto itself.

They may be more like each other than Lisp, Forth, or Haskell (they're all basically procedural for one thing) but they're still very different and have very different programmer cultures. That's why only one language on your list (C) is still widely used

Re:

[tcopeland]

> I wonder how much orphaned legacy Delphi code
> there is out there looking for a support route.

Here's an option - a Java to Delphi [blogs.com] converter (in the second paragraph).

Re:Mixed Reaction....

[arth1]

Half of me is saying "cool!"

The other half is looking very confused and asking "why?"

I'm also feeling rather blaise about it...

Re:

[treeves]

ugh, bad pun. What's the probability of that on Slashdot?

Re:

[autophile]

I'm also feeling rather blaise about it...

We should believe in supporting 2.2... because there's no downside.

--Rob

Re:

[alico]

Pascal is the new COBOL and it's going to be around for a while. I've used the language for 20 years and really like it but I like to keep a balanced diet with other languages like C/C++ and C#.

Re:

[EraserMouseMan]

If a company is using software based on Pascal it is obvious that they have zero willingness to change for one reason or another. So what would motivate them to change to a different compiler?

And oh, if they are already using a for-profit Pascal compiler, they've already payed for it. If they haven't payed for it then they are getting good pirated copies and don't intend to pay for it anyway. And if they are starting a new project they will not be choosing Pascal to write it in (even if they can get a fr

Pascal is like a classic car

[DragonHawk]

I view Turbo/Object Pascal the same way a lot of people view a classic car: It may have been eclipsed by more modern technology, but it still has a certain elegance and appeal to those who knew it in its heyday. Sure, the latest cars have electronic fuel injection and engine monitors and other advanced technology, but there's still nothing like working on a classic engine. It's nostalgia, yes, but good stuff, still.

END. (* PROGRAM *)

Pascal is so '80s

[toddbu]

I learned Pascal in the 1980's when I was in college. Haven't used it since. I never did like the strict type checking or the whacky for loops that had to run at least once. FORTRAN and then C/C++ have served me pretty well over the years, although I write a lot of PHP, bash, and some C# now.

Re:

[Secret Rabbit]

Just because you don't use it, doesn't mean it isn't used. For instance, I knew someone that used Pascal in industry as an Engineer. Can't remember exactly what kind of Engineer though (it's been about 6 years). But, even if it wasn't used in industry at all, these developments would still be *very* useful as it is quite useful as a learning language.

Basically, please remember that there are lands beyond your horizon. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean that they don't exist nor does it mean th

Re:

[glwtta]

Basically, please remember that there are lands beyond your horizon.

So you are saying that there was one person that used it six years ago?

And why would you want a "learning language" that you will never use again? Niche languages that are good at specific tasks (Fortran, etc) are one thing, but Pascal is just an outdated procedural language - the only thing keeping it going at this point is nostalgia.

Pascal is alive and well in installers

[melstav]

InstallShield and InnoSetup installers contain PascalScript engines. InnoSetup is written using Delphi -- Pascal. I believe InstallShield is too, but it's been a while since I quit using InstallShield in favor of InnoSetup.

Re:

[pedantic bore]

... as it is quite useful as a learning language.

Actually, it's fairly well known to suck as a learning language.

Or at least some people think so [virginia.edu].

Classic Pascal != Borland Pascal

[DragonHawk]

Actually, it's fairly well known to suck as a learning language. Or at least some people think so.

It's worth pointing out that most, if not all, of the objections in Kernighan's famous essay do not apply to Borland's Pascal dialect.

Re:

[crivens]

Well said. I maintain a system running OpenVMS Pascal, with code that is 20+ years old. Some people aren't aware that older, legacy languages are still being used for various reasons.

Re:

[sconeu]

I once wrote a AN/UYK-20 assembly to pseudocode generator in Pascal. This was done on a TOPS-20 system, and I didn't have access to shells/scripting or C, so I wrote it in Pascal.

Ugh.

Re:

[FooBarWidget]

I have written a commercial application in Delphi (Object Pascal) that's still being sold today.
Yeah, original Pascal is 80s. Modern Pascal (read: Object Pascal) is not, although it is 90s - it has good support for OO, but Delphi only recently added support for generics/templates.

Pascal and Modula 2 in the '80s

[ackthpt]

I too learned Pascal in the early 80's when it was that or Fortran IV. Both seemed to me to require a lot of typing to accomplish anything. I picked up Modula2 for my Amiga as I already knew Pascal and it was quite similar, the Modula2 compiler was relatively inexpensive and the executables were tight and fast. Eventually I picked up Lattice C for the Amiga (an earlier version in a bargain bin, which I paid a bit more and upgraded to the latest release :o) and never looked back.

Re:

[ChrisA90278]

So 1980's? It was not new then. My copy of Wirth's "Pascal User manual and report" was printed in 1975. Pascalhad been out for about a year at that point. Pascal in the 80's was about as new a Java is today. At mid life I'd say.

Re:

[calidoscope]

I remember one of my fellow dormies getting into Pascal ca 1974 or so - running on a CDC-6400 (BTW, the same computer that SPICE was developed on)- and he was quite fond of it. He was later exposed to "An abomination in the eyes of the Lord" from some outfit in New Jersay, making comments that if Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor, the phone company would still be using vacuum tubes.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

Strings were also what made me hate Pascal. Delphi included support for two kinds of string, C strings and Pascal strings. C strings were NULL-terminated, Pascal strings had one byte at the start indicating their length. In principle, this isn't a problem, but a lot of API functions took C strings, but the documentation said they took Pascal strings. They would then iterate over the length of the string, and keep going well beyond the end because they never found a terminating NULL byte. The program wo

I still like Pascal

[Colin Smith]

TurboPascal was great. Or is it Delphi now?

I still need a blue screen to write code quickly.

 

Re:I still like Pascal

[suv4x4]

TurboPascal was great. Or is it Delphi now?

I still need a blue screen to write code quickly.

FreePascal is probably the best representation of what Pascal used to be. Unfortunately after years and years of incompetent management, Delphi remains just an empty shell of its former self. The project was tossed around too many times now, shrunk down, and there are no guarantees for how long it'll exist or be sold to unknown 3rd party.

Many companies with active Delphi code projects are porting to FreePascal (other reasons aside from the sad state of Delphi include compatibility with Mac and other platforms).

Re:

[mikelieman]

VistA's CPRS application == Delphi will be around another 20 years.

Explanation of VistA

[tepples]

For those who can't tell VistA from Windows Vista, VistA [wikipedia.org] (notice final capital letter) is the electronic health record system used by veterans' hospitals under the United States Department of Veterans Affairs [wikipedia.org]. VistA CPRS [va.gov] is its GUI front end.

Re:I still like Pascal

[tepples]

I still need a blue screen to write code quickly.

You're in luck. Free Pascal works on Windows.

Re:

[IdahoEv]

I still need a blue screen to write code quickly.

That's ... weird. I've always found BSOD's to be a major obstacle to rapid development.

Good Stuff

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

FreePascal has come a long way, and at least for me, it's a very valuable tool. I may not be exactly the target audience, but I prefer Object Pascal over C(++) any day for many reasons, and FPC has been my sidekick ever since Delphi did it's magic trick of fading into obscurity and uselessness. Lazarus needs some more work though, but it's getting there. Hell, if I had the time to spare, I'd contribute myself (sadly, I don't). "Good work" and thanks to the guys that made it all happen!

Re:

[Coryoth]

FPC has been my sidekick ever since Delphi did it's magic trick of fading into obscurity and uselessness.

If you're looking for a Delphi replacement, you might want to consider Chrome [remobjects.com], which is Object Pascal with a variety of nice extra features, including lambda expressions, generics, nullable types, and design by contract. The downsides are that it is a .NET langauge (though it works with Mono [remobjects.com] apparently), and that only the command line tools are free -- the whole suite is pricey (though comparable in cost to Delphi I guess). It is, at the least, worth looking into if you're a Pascal fan.

Always nice with cross platform native compilers

[Jugalator]

With all the focus on JIT compiled and interpreted languages, it's nice to see this niche still being worked on and kept up to date with current software, like 64-bit Windows. There are still reasons to build applications for these platforms, while at the same time seeing cross platform source code as a benefit. This is why I also like the D programming language, although I have to admit Free Pascal got it beat as for the cross platform support, where it's still lacking things like native 64-bit and Windows

Re:

[Jugalator]

Oh and that comment of mine was missing that there's also an IDE for cross platform GUI development? Wow, now we're starting to get into rare territory... I've been looking for *good* IDE's for this purpose in the past, the closest I came to was something like wxWidgets. I dislike large libraries that need to be installed for GUI support, and this one apparently only needs GTK for Linux, and nothing special at all for Windows. Getting more interesting... :-) If I only knew Pascal better, it was something li

For some definition of the word 'free'

[everphilski]

Microsoft's free C++ compiler has been able to target x64 for quite some time ... it isn't open source, but is free as in beer.

C# programs even work in Linux, without a recompile, using Mono :)

Re:For some definition of the word 'free'

[andreyw]

Why was parent modded troll? The article says "only free software compiler" which could mean either a compiler that is free software (as in FOSS), or a software compiler that is free. Certainly, Microsoft distributes a C++ compiler that targets both AMD64 and IA-64 and is compiler that is free, although not FOSS.

It's this childish "Waah, its MS and not FOSS" attitude that make all of /. readers look like pimply basement dwelling dorks.

Ugh...

Re:

[andreyw]

Me. A corporate shill. Why yes. Because using a non-``the holy GNU'''s C compiler somehow means you sell your soul to the very devil.

Re:

[everphilski]

No. "Free software" has been a term of art for over two decades, meaning software that is distributed under terms respecting the four freedoms.

Now that is funny, because I recall in the late 80's getting books from my local library telling me how to obtain 'free software' (for a nominal S&H fee) which was **not** open source, merely people who had the good nature to release software for free. Get off your high horse, RMS doesn't have an exclusive lock on the word 'free'.

Re:[ac]For some definition of the word 'free'

[everphilski]

Windows Forms? no... but prettymuch everything else does. I use it as a scripting language to write tools, not pretty GUI's :)

Ah

[fishthegeek]

Pascal. The eight wonder of the IT world.

Slashdotted

[ElMiguel]

Cue the "the server must be written in Pascal" jokes...

Here's a MirrorDot [mirrordot.org] link for the FreePascal site.

Mirror

[winkydink]

http://www.networkmirror.com/p0HL5pKL5D9ZVmgq/www.freepascal.org/index.html [networkmirror.com]

and

http://www.networkmirror.com/06poF0hRSRppE66S/www.osnews.com/story.php/18592/index.html [networkmirror.com]

I freed myself of Pascal...

[AetherBurner]

when I got out of college. I have been clean and sober from Pascal since then and I plan to stay on the wagon.

80's college nostalgia

[theolein]

Like many others here, I learnt Pascal at school in the early 80s before C, then C++ and finally Java became the standard teaching languages. The thing about Pascal, of course, is that it was designed to be a teaching language. All of that verbose syntax is meant to teach good structured programming. While Object Pascal will never reach the mainstream in any way more than Delphi did, it would perhaps have eliminated many of the errors made by coders due to the byzantine complexity of C++. At least thats what I think. That enforced verbosity made the code very readable, in a similar way to the way Java is, except that Pascal is native code.

Re:

[vocaro]

except that Pascal is native code

Pascal isn't native code. Pascal compilers may compile the language to native code, but Java compilers can do that, too.

Re:

[PCM2]

Pascal isn't native code. Pascal compilers may compile the language to native code, but Java compilers can do that, too.

And the way I remember it, Apple ][ Pascal compiled to a variant of UCSD p-Code, [wikipedia.org] which seemed obscure at the time but seems kind of ahead of its time now.

Re:

[antdude]

At my university [apu.edu]'s CS, Pascal was the first programming language to take as a requirement. The sad part was it was the last year before it went away to be replaced by C++. It was in fall semster of 1994, not even the 80s. :P

Re:

[Tom9729]

http://taoyue.com/tutorials/pascal/contents.html [taoyue.com]

I've been reading through that and it seems pretty decent.

Googling "pascal tutorials" or something similar turns up quite a few results as well.

Re:80's college nostalgia

[FlyingGuy]

Pascal is arguably one of the easiest languages to learn there ever was. It's very verboseness leads to readable code, but don't confuse that with weakness. Modern Pascal implementations like Delphi and Free Pascal are powerful languages.

The basics of pascal are simple:

// A simple function
Function FooFunc(X : integer) : integer ;
begin
result := X + 1 ;
end;

// A simple Procedure
Procedure FooProc(var X : integer );
begin
X := X + 1 ;
end;

Note the difference in the way the function and the procedure are declared above. Pascal passes parameters either by reference or by value. Using the var directive in the procedure declaration of x as integer I told the compiler to pass the value in by reference and therefor that value can be changed by the procedure. Note that when declaring the parameter this way I can ONLY pass a variable to it of the same type, or typecast a variable of a similar type. If I do NOT use the var invocation in declaring the parameter I can pass either a variable or a literal as below:

// pass in a literal
Y := FooFunc(1) ;

// pass in a variable
Y := FooFunc(i) ;

// Y will contain the value of the operation of the function.

FooProc(i) ;

// The variable i is now modified by the procedure.

FooProc(1);

// Illegal syntax, a variable MUST be passed to the procedure.

This should give you a basic start, the rest is really easy. Pascal does pointers, Structures, file I/O with either typed or untyped files, Inline Coding, Inline Assembler, pretty much everything you would expect from a robust language.

Re:

[Vexorian]

// Illegal syntax, a variable MUST be passed to the procedure.

thank god it isn't like that anymore, at least not in the delphi compiler I am using.
Because of lame reasons I have plenty of delphi projects on win32, I have used delphi for 3 years, and I have learned to hate it. Yep, I hate pascal's syntax, I guess there is some time in life in which the verboness stops appealing you. The lack of a keyword to set result AND exit the function is something you would get to miss if you are used to any other l

Wow...

[gordgekko]

Pascal is still around? I used to do some light coding in Pascal back in the mid-1980s. So when is a new version of Modula going to be released? :-)

I am not a programmer really

[treeves]

. . .but I learned three programming languages: BASIC, Pascal, and FORTRAN, in that order. That is all. Well, there was HP-41 synthetic programming and HP-48 too.

Not the first free compiler to support win64

[Anonymous Coward]

Just the first free compiler that has an official release. The trunk of GCC supports Win64 for a while now. Just there has not been a release yet. This has been true since 2007-03-30. Binutils support win64 was added 2006-09-20.

64-bit Windows

[zdude255]

Free Pascal is now the first and only free software compiler that targets 64-bit Windows.

Sure, but then you have to write it in Pascal!

What? No 65816 support?

[OrangeTide]

How do you expect me to use Pascal on my Apple IIgs or port my games to Super Famicom?

What's the advantage?

[afabbro]

We have GNU Pascal. GNU binutils targets Win64. Ergo, we can already write Pascal for Win64, if we wanted to.

What's the advantage of Free Pascal? Just curious, not being sarcastic...

What's pascal like now?

[bcrowell]

I did a fair amount of pascal programming in the 80's, and it seemed all right I guess, but IIRC there were some problems with the language:

1. The standardized language was very small, so there was a tendency for it to fracture into many incompatible languages.
2. At that time, the implementations represented a string as a length byte followed by the string data, so you were limited to strings of length 255.
3. I don't think there was any (standard) way to defeat the strong typing in cases where you needed to.
4. Was there garbage collection? If so, I don't recall it as being an idiomatic part of the language, except maybe for strings...? Well, most languages back then didn't have it (and gc's sucked back then, so gc languages tended to be slow), but today...
5. I was always annoyed by the gotchas in the syntax -- the language seemed unnecessarily picky about periods and semicolons.

Has any of this changed? Has modern pascal settled on a single standardized version of the language? Is gc easy, idiomatic, and consistently supported in libraries and language constructs? Is there good unicode support? It seems to me that today, if I wanted a typesafe language I'd use java, and if I wanted a language that compiled to native code I'd use C or OCaml.

Re:

[jma05]

> 1. The standardized language was very small, so there was a tendency for it to fracture into many incompatible languages.

Small is relative. Pascal language is now Object Pascal. It is not a small language.

> 2. At that time, the implementations represented a string as a length byte followed by the string data, so you were limited to strings of length 255.

Delphi and FreePascal have PChar as well as AnsiString.

> 3. I don't think there was any (standard) way to defeat the strong typing in cases

Yay

[Y-Crate]

this;

is;

great('news');

SYNTAX ERROR: Missing " " after ";"

Dennis Ritchie on Pascal

[Joce640k]

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html [lysator.liu.se]

I sincerely hope the language has been fixed since that was written...

Re:

[k8to]

Many of his points are about primordial pascal, which no one has really used during the entire time of its popularity (the 80s, mostly) and of course thereafter. However, the 'improved' pascals do not have a formal specification, which is a sad thing. Most people shoot for "tastes like borland", which I guess is at least fairly static now that they've given up on it.

Some of the typing weirdness remains, although it is better hidden. Some of the cosmetic issues remain.

Really the big problem with Free Pasc

Re:

[hey hey hey]

Ummm, that is an article by Brian W. Kernighan, not Ritchie...

increasing the programmer comfort.

[Omega1045]

increasing the programmer comfort. I do not get this statement. What the heck does anyting in this article have to do with my comfort? Since this is a compiler, do you speak of my comfort at compile time? That would be helped by code that is better checked at compile time. Errrr! Not Pascal! You need a managed language like Java or C#. I understand that there is a .Net Pascal out there, but this announcement just does not interest me. It is 2007, not 1997! We are building big, complex systems with

Object code efficiency

[jgs]

Years ago (early 90's maybe?) I remember reading a paper about an empirical study -- as opposed to unsupported but vehement opinions -- of the relative efficiency of Pascal and C object code. As I recall, the conclusion was that Pascal fared better, because Pascal's strong typing and other semantic clues make it an easier target for an optimizer.

Anyone remember the paper, and have a pointer to it? The requisite five minutes with google haven't been successful for me.

A Valuable Resource

[MacDaffy]

Bill Catambay has done yeoman work in keeping the Pascal spark alive in all its flavors. For those of you who are nostalgic, curious, desperate, eager to find a centralized repository for mockery, or want to try one of the easiest, most powerful tools you've ever used, visit Pascal Central [pascal-central.com]. Tools, compilers, source code, links, Bill's article on the reasons Pascal is still relevant (which I helped edit), and a community of people ready, willing, and able to get those of you interested in giving the language another look (or a first look) a lot of help and support.

If you want power, readability, a maintainable code base, easier string-handling, no-brainer memory management, and an elegant "No-BS" language, try Pascal. It has survived this long for a reason.

Hmph.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't feed the trolls, it only encourages them.

Re:

[ScrewMaster]

Sprinkle a little cyanide or Prussic acid in your replies.

Re:

[suv4x4]

Ada has the strong typing capabilities of Pascal, with multitasking and object support as well. [...] Does Free Pascal offer any advantages over Ada?

Object Pascal supports multitasking and objects for quite some time, so I guess the question should be the other way around.

And I suppose in this case the answer would be "Ada compilers are not widely available (and free) for as many platforms". Not to mention the huge libraries of Pascal code out there.

Re:

[suv4x4]

At least bother to read the summary: FreePascal is the standard ported to many platforms. One single standard.

Re:

[hangareighteen]

• Available on a larger variety of platforms and OSes.
• Great support for interfacing with external code.
• The compiler is wickedly fast and is really good at producing compact executables.
• FPC supports several different pascal dialects.

Re:

[Col Bat Guano]

* Available on a larger variety of platforms and OSes.

Do you think so? Ada is available (as others have stated) as part of the GNU compiler collection, so is available on a large number of systems. Other compiler vendors supply compilers for other more obscure processors. How do you know that Pascal is more available?

* Great support for interfacing with external code.

It's pretty ordinary in comparison to Ada's Interface package hierarchy and collection of pragmas allowing you to specify in very fin

Re:

[jma05]

* The compiler is wickedly fast and is really good at producing compact executables.

> If it's using gcc to do the code generation, then Gnat (which also uses gcc) should do the same job. I don't know about other compilers.

I think all your other points are quite valid. Ada was always a better specified language.

GPC (GCC), Lazarus, Virtual Pascal and Delphi are different compilers. GPC may be comparable to Gnat (I only had passing experience with it). Delphi is arguably the fastest native compiler I have s

Re:

[Col Bat Guano]

"Ada does a lot more checks on the code than Pascal does and will likely be a bit slower anyway."

Possibly. I think for similar programs though the extra checks shouldn't come into account. Pascal always checked array boundaries, and so long as you are only doing standard programming (no subtypes, no derived types etc.) it should be comparable.

Gnat Ada does use a source file model for the packages, so has to rescan any "with"ed packages (similar to #include) with every compilation unit. Does FreePascal

Re:What advantages does this have over Ada?

[Just Some Guy]

Does Free Pascal offer any advantages over Ada?

It's not Ada. Isn't that enough?

Re:

[Col Bat Guano]

I've used Ada off and on, and never had this reaction. What do you think was wrong with it?

Re:

[Coryoth]

Ada has the strong typing capabilities of Pascal, with multitasking and object support as well. It seems to be the main Pascal-like language for serious, high-reliability applications. Does Free Pascal offer any advantages over Ada?

You might as well ask what advantages it offers over Eiffel, another language that offers strong typing, object support, and clean clear syntax. Better yet Eiffel not only has a GPL compiler with LGPL libraries [loria.fr], you can also opt for a GPL compiler suite, libraries and complete development environment [origo.ethz.ch].

The advantage, in the end, is that it is Pascal, and if that's the language that someone wants then other languages like Ada and Eiffel, despite similarities just aren't Pascal.

Re:um? size?

[hangareighteen]

Your examply only shows that you don't exactly know how to use the fpc compiler. It's okay.. it's got a lot of options, and it dosen't exactly work like C. For example, the pascal compiler generates, by default, static executables. And C, dynamic.

Yes, simply looking at obj size will make this look bad. Actually looking at the object itself makes it pretty clear what's really happening. Remember, 'file' is your friend.

Re:

[tomstdenis]

I suspected as much, but the point is how many others are going to make the same mistake? Why isn't dynamic [shared] objects the default on Linux platforms? etc...

Normally it's the opposite that you want static binaries in only odd situations [e.g. to make an application binary-wise portable, to use it when glibc or other libs may not be available, to free up a register on non-PIC friendly platforms, e.g. x86-32].

Tom

Re:

[hangareighteen]

I wouldn't think so.. anyone attempting to use a language should study it, and the toolchain involved. Just because we're all mostly using unix and have become used to the ABI and methodologies dosen't mean that they are sane, or are going to apply to every other tool we pick up and use.. this is the same for the FPC compiler. As my father might say: "That's not a toy. Put it down until you understand what it does."

Um.. isn't application portability one of the strong suits of the FPC compiler.

Re:

[cnettel]

Do you link statically to glibc? of course, that's part of the ubiquity argument, but it's not like the libraries are bloated just for the sake of it.

Re:um? size?

[arth1]

Both were run through "strip" to remove any possible debug/extra details. testp is from this pascal program

begin
            writeln('hello world');
end.

That's bad pascal. You lack the program declaration with specification of IO, and you also have a null statement at the end (the semicolon that should not be there). Try:

program helloworld(output);
begin
        writeln('hello world')
end.

why would I want Pascal?

You might want a stronger typed language than C, where there's no risk of signed/unsigned typecasting behind your back, or where you can limit the data type. There's no risk of your plane thinking it's flying upside down when you cross the dateline, for example. Or of spinning clockwise 182 times to make a 65535 degree turn, when you really wanted a 1 degree left turn.
Then there's legibility. Pascal /is/ very legible, compared to most other languages. If more than one person or team has to work on code, it's far easier than even well-written C or java.

I personally miss UCSD-pascal and p-code. It did what java was meant to do -- run as a pseudo-machine with pre-compiled bytecode in a machine independent fashion. Too many youngsters today think that Sun created that concept with java, when in reality it was a ripoff of USCD-pascal's p-code for a C++-like language.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:

[tomstdenis]

While my rant wasn't so much about the language (I actually like the pascal language), but since you made it about that I'll answer.

I've heard the "pascal lets no error occur" bullshit argument, also paraphrased for C++, Java, C#, etc.

I don't know about you, but I try to develop software that I can verify, or at the very least test properly. I also write code with buffer management, type management, etc, in mind. I also use as many warning flags as practical, etc.

If you don't just sit down and crack out l

Secure p-code

[CustomDesigned]

I used P-code also, and other ancient virtual machines from the '60s. IMHO, however, the key feature of the Java virtual machine is the ability to create a secure sandbox for arbitrary p-code. The byte-code verifier allows maintaining the security even when compiling to native code. I don't know whether Java was the first with these features (and I seem to recall a similar verifier for some other obscure language), but it has succeeded in becoming the first widely used language with such features. As I

Re:um? size?

[tomstdenis]

I'm not against Pascal as a language, I just question why we need yet another toolchain. Why not write a good pascal frontend for GCC and then take advantage of all the platforms they support + optimizers, etc. The optimizers in GCC are hardly language specific, most of them work on very abstract machine representations after the language has been compiled to an independent machine type.

And yeah, I would be for ranting against Cobol as it's ancient and not very useful. Fortran from what I hear still serv

Re:

[hangareighteen]

We don't need anything.. we like it. Why should I use libTomCrypt as opposed to the many other libraries like it already available? Why should I port all my crypto-using code to your library from what I'm already using? I mean, libTomCrypt is cool and all, but unless I can be assured that it will actively developed in 5 years -- I can't really go and use it in any of my projects. OpenSSL has been around for a long time, and has plenty of people whom I'd assume are very smart about crypto working on

Re:

[Electrum]

LibTomCrypt provides more generic crypto services (and more of them). You should also note that I don't actively push LTC anymore (I use it, but after what happened to me on usenet I don't give a fuck if anyone else uses it). ... LibTomCrypt is the past, not future.

That's too bad. High quality public domain code is rare. Thank you for all your hard work.

Re:

[fbjon]

Haha, I remember that bug! I had several exes from ancient times that needed patching. Turbo Pascal was also my first compiled language, before that it was probably nothing but BASIC. I even tried creating fancy 3d-graphics with TP, using nothing but the library functions for drawing rectangles and other assorted coloured shapes.

Thank god I came to my senses.

I loved Apple Pascal

[Weaselmancer]

I had only written in basic up until then. Losing the line numbers and gotos was like having a light shine down from heaven.

I will always think fondly of Pascal. To this day, whenever I'm writing in C, when I see an opening brace I think "begin". When I see a close brace I think "end".