GNU Pascal

GNU Pascal (GPC) is an implementation of the Pascal programming language that is compatible with the GNU toolchain- It is compliant with ISO Pascal and Borland Pascal with some extensions taken from (but by no means fully compatible with) Pascal-SC, Extended ISO Pascal and Borland Delphi, and a few extensions of its own, primarily intended to ease compatibility with different UNIX OSs and GNU's GCC. GNU Pascal requires that GCC and other parts of the GNU toolchain.

The project was originally started in the 1990s by Jukka Virtanen and was then an ISO compatible tool that partially supported the ISO Extended Pascal standard. It was made in response to the complete lack of free ISO Pascal tools generally and specifically the almost complete lack of Pascal implementations that worked under Unices. Peter Gerwinski who did the OS/2 and DOS port then started implementing Borland/Turbo Pascal compatibility in the latter half of the 90s. Despite the existing number of free TP compatible implementations already and they have mushroomed since, no further work has been done since the early 90s to make the tools more Extended ISO Pascal compatible. This contributed to the death of the project since after Free Pascal arrived on the scene that was a Turbo Pascal clone from the outset and easier to use to boot, specially on MS Windows. Free Pascal grabbed most of the mindset and contributors from GNU Pascal.

GPC is notoriously slow in compiling and no real development on the compiler has taken place since 2005 although the project is supposedly still alive, and the OS/2 version is even older since they never ported it from EMX toolchain to the GCC one, although it is somewhat usable as it stands. It can be considered a dead duck by now since it does not work with modern versions of the GNU toolchain.

Versions

• 2.0

Prerequisites

• OS/2 2.1 or later
• EMX 0.91 or later
• EMX GCC compiler

Known issues

• Debugger output not fully compatible with GDB

Links

• GNU Pascal HQ

License

• Open source published under the GPL v2
• Some included libraries are under the LGPL v2.1

Authors

• Jukka Virtanen (Original author)
• Peter Gerwinski (OS/2 & DOS port, Borland Pascal compatibility)
• Jan-Jaap van der Heijden (Windows port)
• Frank Heckenbach (Current maintainer)
• Waldek Hebisch
• Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (Borland compatibility)
• Dominik Freche (Manual)