Re: Re: JD...
  By: Scott Adams to Stephen Hurd on Mon Feb 09 2004 21:58:33

 >  SH> I haven't found any usefull non-commercial ones.
 > 
 >         Well Delphi...Fp...Vp...are the 3 common ones.  There
 >         are some oddball alternatives out there though.

Of all the free *nix pascal compilers out there, only FP and GPC will run on
non-Linux plavours of *nix.

Unfortuantely, in FreePascal, the Linux headers were used for ALL *nix systems.
This results in many things not working due to incorrect constants.  Even
further, the structs used by Linux are (or were last time I looked at FPC) used
in the non-Linux ports.  This badly breaks a number of things... none of the
relatively straightforward calls, just the stuff that starts coming into play
when you need advanced features.  One example that leaps to mind is file
locking.  Although I've sent the FPC team a notice of that so it is hopefully
fixed by now.  Bascially, if you're not porting to Linux and Linux only, all
except GPC are going to cause more problems than solutions.

GPC on the other hand is a cross-platform pascal compiler that actually works
on multiple platforms.  The only issue with GPC is that the GPC team is
resistant to supporting "Borlandisms" the heavily used
non-standard things that
all of Borlands compilers supported.  The one that's most commonly seen is the
use if strvar[0] as containing the length of the string.  GPC does NOT support
this... it's not part of the pascal standard.  Unfortunately, most BBS software
makes heavy use of borlandisms and as a result, huge amounts of code changes
are required... as well as a carefull vetting of the whole source code.
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