macOS Free Pascal 2.0

Wow, this brings me back to the first days of programming. When I was a kid we progressed through LOGO, BASIC, Pacall, and then MLX. Cool. I am going to stick with DreamCard though.

What a great teaching tool, and perhaps a pratical development tool for legacy systems.

Me too! I did a ton of programming on Pascal in my CS A-level and my Uni subsidiary courses - as well as COBOL (I am that old) and x86 assembler. I had a look at Delphi but it seemed a bit too contrived for my liking and C++ made my head hurt. My Cocoa/Obj-C is coming along nicely at the moment though.

Hehe cool, think I'm going play around with this for a bit before realizing I could be reading Macrumors instead.

Pascal had charm, I always thought it was a more... pleasing language than c.

haha, pascal was great! it was the language used to teach me the main fundementals of programming! its one of the most enjoyable languages that i've used so far! i loved all those dos text based interfaces! i can't remember the name of the program, but i used to program pascal on an apple mac lc. the good old days! (about 5yrs ago! haha)

i did cobol in uni last year, it annoyed me so much, tedious and hard to read! the lecturer used to always mention every lecture how cobol in not a dead language! hmm... should i believe him?

i think i'll download it too for a wee looksee and a tinker!

rowanhall said:

the lecturer used to always mention every lecture how cobol in not a dead language! hmm... should i believe him?

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My Latin teacher used to say that about Latin. It was BS

Seriously though, I heard that people that knew COBOL were getting big money around the time of the Y2K bug as the main bank's had really old systems that still used COBOL and they wanted them checked/fixed. Dunno if it's true but it's what I heard....sadly well after the Y2K rollover

I agree,

We have programmers for common languages... they get paid crap. And then we have programmers for legacy systems. They get paid *BAM*.

Knowing the uncommon languages can be beneficial sometimes, especially since programmers have a nice turnover rate.

haha! nice one!

i remember hearing about the millenium bug testers sitting in over the new year just watching and waiting for the 'big bang' to happen getting paid £800+ p/h! haha! classic!

eh.. what are you guys on

First, great post!

But to the rest of you, .. you clearly have no idea what has happened to pascal the past 10, 15 years. This is no longer your fathers pascal.

FPC is basically a Delphi clone, one of the most successfull development systems for windows. Unrivaled even by C++ the last 10 years. Delphi is 100% object oriented, it produces real exe files (not runtime files like java or basic P code). I have worked as a delphi developer for the past 9 years and still make a good living from it. Delphi is responsible for more software development than C++ on windows. Delphi can compile for .net as well, so you dont miss much once you have learned Delphi.

You can also like to C libraries, compile your own dll and lib files (for use by C coders or any language that can load library files). Everything C/C++, .net and Java have - Delphi has.

I recently bought a mac, but i findmyself stupified by how tiredsome and awkward the development cycle is for this platform. I am already converting the C headers to pascal so i can get started in freepascal.

Next time, check before you talk down about a language. If mac had a decent Delphi clone - you would double the production of software over night for the mac platform. So i hope and pray Borland will jump on the bandwagon as soon as the 64bit native compiler is done for vista.

jonaa said:

First, great post!

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Old too

jonaa said:

I recently bought a mac, but i findmyself stupified by how tiredsome and awkward the development cycle is for this platform.

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How so? Examples would be nice.

jonaa said:

If mac had a decent Delphi clone - you would double the production of software over night for the mac platform.

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If that were to bring more business, engineering, and medical software, I'm all for it. But if it were to bring more text editors and audio players, no thanks .

Definitely not what *you're* on...

Ah, I think you drank too much Delphi-flavored cool-aid
I really don't think Delphi rivals C++ or C#...

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

Ouch, look at all those red arrows pointing down...

Edit: wait a sec, the OP is from 2005! I guess the production of software has been doubled for a couple of years now...

kainjow said:

If that were to bring more business, engineering, and medical software, I'm all for it. But if it were to bring more text editors and audio players, no thanks .

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Personally, I'm looking for more audio editors and text players

Kerry Sanders said:

Just heard on the Slashdot Review podcast that Free Pascal 2.0 is now available.

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I just checked and wow. It's still here on my bookshelf "Pascal User Manual and Report" by Jensen and Wirth.

This was the first Pascal book. My edition was printed 1976 It still has the price tag on it $6.95 It was an expensive book being that it was from Springer-Verlag

We used Wirth's compiler, the one written at ETH Zurich it ran on (of all things) a CDC 6600 mainframe.

I think this book, like the Algol 60 book before it should serve as a model of how to write a book that defines a programming language. It is very thin and to the point and easy to read with both examples and a formal definition.

Later I did quite a bit of work using Ada, kind of a grown up Pascal.