-=> Quoting Stephen Hurd to Scott Adams <=-

 SH> Re: Re: JD...
 SH> 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.

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

     Well the question was not linux but since you bring it up there
     are very limited linux versions of ANY language. 

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

     Possible.  Depends on what you need the language/program to do.

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


        Yes I've run into that.






... Did you ever wonder what happened to B4?  I did. - Jinxo
--- Fringe BBS