Free pascal is an exellant pascal compiler developped under the GLP licence.
It works on many platforms, such as Linux and Windows.
You can dowload it, without paying, at the URL : http://www.freepascal.org/sdown.html
The main page is : http://www.freepascal.org/
Using Free pascal, I developped commented examples, and the beginning of an
object library. I will call this library the " GAP Library " or simply
GAPLIB. "GAP" means Group of Applied Physics. I developped there a
similar library using Borland OWL, with Borland Pascal 7.0 under windows 3.1.
Here are versions you can download :
- Demo04
- Demo05
- Demo06
In Demo04, accelerators and Toolbars are treated. Also nice 3D drawing
is done. tEx055.pp tEx057.pp and tEx058.pp are nice and big examples.
In Demo05, some mathematical units have been developped, and a program
which plays at MineSweeper in tEx065.pp This last program was a kind of game
for me and took my some weeks, and I was quite buzzy with other things, thus
I didn't progress as I thought.
Six years elapses between the Demo05 and Demo06 versions.
I don't spend much time on this developpment, but if it can be usefull for somebody,
here it is.
I used DevPascal which is a basic but good Integrated Developpment Environment
(IDE) under windows, to write and compile FreePascal programs.
You can downlad it at the URL : http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/pascal.html
The main page is : http://www.bloodshed.net/devpascal.htm
The text IDE from FreePascal didn't work with satifactions when I tried it. I had very quickly crashes. I don't know why ?
I plan to continue the developpement of commened examples and library. I would like to do the same under Linux KDE, but I have 10 years experience under windows, and no experience programming under Linux KDE or GNOME.
I tried a littre GTK, which seems very interresting, but doesn't use the facilities
and security of object programming. Maybe an object library using GTK would
be interresting. For more information about GTK, see http://www.gtk.org/
I began to see how WOL works, but it is not commented, and had big bugs in december
2001. Since that time, I didn't try it again, since I played developping my
own library. After each execution of the version 0.7, I had to reboot my computer,
because the resources of my computer went down to zero. I tried to see where
the problem was, but found only another problem that resources are kept into
memory. Thus using many different colors make the computer crash very quickly.
For more information about WOL, see http://wolibrary.tripod.com
I found it it a good project, but documentation fails, and memorising resources
instead of releasing them, is not a good idea.
If you have problems with the .ZIP files, or simply want to use the bes file
manager under window I know, dowload the shareware Windows Commander at the
URL : http://www.ghisler.com
For me it replaces so many other utilities at the same time. A button launch
bar, an FTP program, many decompacter such as unzip, a file comparaison program,
a directory comparaison program, many files viewer (It you download IrfanView
and use it with Window Commander addOns) and more. It even dedtected once a
virus in a computer where I worked, simply by telling us that the executable
file has been modified.
For fun... and because I miss a lot Borland Pascal for windows. I dislike
Delphi.