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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."
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.
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!