FreePascal today probably doesn't need any introduction to just about any Pascal developers out there. It's been there for a good long while now and most of us have heard about it either in forums, in Google search results, or in probably any non commercial Pascal related websites.
FreePascal is by far the most widely used free implementation of the Pascal language. Some of the reasons of it's popularity is definitely it's compatibility with the borland family of Pascal compilers (Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal with Objects and Delphi).
FreePascal is a Pascal dialect that has been created to respond to the commercially available Turbo Pascal and Delphi compilers. It is Open Source and as such offers all of the advantages of Open Source Free Software. FreePascal is an implementation of all 3 Pascal standards, namely:
The Unextended Pascal Standard: Established back in 1983. This standard closely resembled the Pascal in the Jensen and Wirth Pascal User Manual And Report
The Extended Pascal Standard: Which was established in 1989. This standard is both an ANSI/IEEE and ISO/IEC standard. Both standards are identical in content with minor editorial differences between the IEEE and ISO/IEC style guides.
The Object Oriented Extensions To Pascal: Established in 1993. This, as it's name implies is a standardization of the Object Oriented extensions that were brought to the Pascal language.
FreePascal offers features that were integrated with the goals of being as similar and compatible as possible to the widespread Turbo Pascal and Borland Pascal with Objects as well as extensions that are compatible with the Borland Delphi compilers. As such language features gave FreePascal it's wide acceptance and high usage factor.
FreePascal was started back in June of 1993 and after about 4 months some first small source files could compile. One of the original objectives of FreePascal was to have a compiler that could compile itself. Hence work around that goal started right then and there. It wasn't until about March of 1995 that the self compilation goal was met. Once that was achieved, FreePascal could then be enhanced and expanded in just about any direction.
In 1996 the project was released to the Internet (perhaps to gather a group of programmers together to work on it some more. Development went on for the following 4 years and in July of the year 2000 FreePascal 1.0 was officially released. Subsequent versions were released until September 2007 when version 2.2.0 of FreePascal (the current version) was announced.
I decided to create a FreePascal forum for more than one reason. The first reason of course is because I love the Pascal language in general. Also, I know that some of the regulars here have been learning Pascal through FreePascal and well now they have a place where they can talk about their learning or programming experiences alike.
Since FreePascal supports so many features taken from the three afore mentioned compilers (Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal with Objects and Delphi) I also want this place to be about those compilers too. This pretty much means that if you use any Pascal you're probably good to go with talking about what you're up to in your Pascal endeavors.
I have special plans for this place. Of course the normal forum related stuff applies. Questions comments, discussions, project updates and the likes are all welcome as you can imagine and let's not mention articles, news items, tutorials (in the classic sense of the term) and other expected contents are, of course, expected. Aside all that though, I would like to turn this place into a very useful and comprehensive resource of everything Pascal related. As such, there isn't a lot of things I won't accept and and want to add here. Organizing will come when there's something to organize. As such, here is some of what I want to have available for visitors.
Tutorials on anything Pascal related.
Tips & Tricks of all kinds (language and editing wise).
Styles and standards (some you've found or some you've created).
Algorithms (sorting, string processing, math and whatever else algorithms can do.
If you have a Pascal project you can definitely talk about it here and maybe even get help if you have questions.
News & Events (organizations, new versions of projects, request for help in group development efforts if you're looking for other people to work with you and the likes.
These are some of the things you can expect to find here. With time, we will all build something that can be not only useful to everyone but also fun and welcoming.
If you want to help out, let me know and just basically start contributing, if you've written something you would like to share with everyone, go right ahead whether it's a project, an article, a tutorial on a specific subject you name it, send it over to me and we'll see what we can do about it.
Now let's get busy people and let's turn this place into what it deserves to be, for all our sake and for the sake of the FreePascal project as well.
MystikShadows