On 19 May 96 Justin Marquez said to Derek Benner...
 JM> would be much if the (**) OPERATOR were built-in (like in FORTRAN).
The reason for your displeasure is buried in history.  Pascal's creator,
Nicholas Wirth, never intended Pascal to be a production language.  It was
written purely as an academic teaching language.  Hence he deliberately left
out lots of Fortranic things like Power (a.k.a. **).  Notice "real" pascal
has Sin() and Cos() but no Tan() function.  Likewise there is ArcTan() but
no ArcSin() or ArcCos().  Wirth left these, as the saying goes, "as an
exercise for the student".
Also, I suspect that having to search for things such as 1**2 which IMPLY a
function call but which do not have the standard syntax of a function call
would slow down the compiler.  Perhaps that's why Fortran compilers are
relatively slow !
If you absolutely must use Fortran syntax, have you considered encapsulating
your number crunching routines within .DLL's written in Fortran ?  You could
call such .DLL's from a human interface written in Delphi.  That's one way
to keep old Fortran Legacy code working in the Windows era.
P.S., I've got nothing against Fortran, I came from there !
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