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Free Pascal 2.0 Released
Eugenia writes "After five years of development, Free Pascal 2.0 is ready and it includes support for many architectures and OSes. It now has threading support, interfaces, widestring and better Delphi support among many other new features. OSNews posted an article introducing the updated GPL compiler." petermgreen adds a list of some of the major changes since the last stable release: "Much better support for Delphi language features (especailly method pointers); more supported CPUs (AMD64, SPARC, PPC (32 bit), ARM) and platforms (Mac OS classic, Mac OS X, MorphOS, Novell Netware); a new and better structured Unix RTL Threading support; and a large number of internal changes including rewriting large parts of the compiler to make it more maintainable and easier to port to new architectures," and notes that "Visual parts of Delphi are being handled by a seperate project known as lazarus, which has not yet reached 1.0 but should do so fairly soon."
If you didn't see the first version, will you be able to follow the plot?
What? OS X? Commercial CPUs!?
We can't have that! Free should work with freeness.
Free Pascal? Was he in jail? Some sort of "Count of Monte Cristo" scenario involving the long dead and completely decayed remains of Blaise Pascal?
I know they used to eat quiche, (which IMO I dont mind every now and again, havent had it for a long while though)
But what does a modern pascal programmer eat?
Name one thing you can do in C++ that you can't do in Object Pascal.
Royally hose the system?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Great! a free programming language! We can use it to rewrite OpenOffice.org and free it from the shackles of proprietary java!
Don't Use Pascel
I dunno. All the power of BASIC with the ease-of-use of C -- maybe it's designed to discourage people from becoming programmers.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Well, Pascal is still used so that people can say how much better Modula 2 is.
Sometime before the ark sailed, Pascal was the first programming language I learned (well, except for Ti58) at college, which was on a DEC 10. An elegant, structured language as I recall, but my elegant and structured code never ran. Why? I discovered a neat way to make the code more efficient, but after many long, long sessions in the terminal room, I was told a bug in the compiler would not compile anything with that routine. So after three years of college and an IT degree, not one piece of code I wrote ever ran. I abandon my dreams of becomming an uber-programmer and became instead a network engineer, of course.