Free Pascal is an open-source development environment that allows you to write Pascal code, and also debug and compile it. Although, Pascal is not as popular as it was some years ago, still it is a widely used programming language. This application will provide you with all the necessary tools to help you write Pascal programs of various complexity levels.
Free Pascal reminds of the “famous” Turbo Pascal. Their graphical user-interfaces are quite similar and many tools from Turbo Pascal are included in this small program as well.
Version 2.6 of Free Pascal comes with a lot of new features, as well as improvements. Many of them are focused on providing Mac users with all the necessary tools to help them develop applications with their systems (it supports Objective-Pascal dialect). Also, Free Pascal is now available in many languages. In addition to this, the compatibility with Delphi has been improved.
Free Pascal will surely come in handy to programmers that are still writing code in Pascal programming language.
v2.6.4 [Jan 3, 2012]
Free Pascal 2.6.0 is a new major version of the Free Pascal compiler.
Some highlights are:
Platforms:
* iPhoneSimulator target
Compiler:
* Many new language features:
* Objective-Pascal dialect, supported on all Mac OS X and iOS targets
* constref parameter modifier for "const by reference"
* Pascal boolean types with multiple sizes (boolean16/32/64)
* ISO 7185 language mode (except for I/O). Features amongst others:
* nested procedure variables
* non-local goto's
* Mac Pascal mode improvements
* nested procedure variables
* univ modifier
* Intrinsics
* sar (shift arithmetic right)
* bsf/bsr (bitscan forward/reverse)
* Delphi compatibility mode improvements
* Nested types, class variables and class local constants
* Advanced records syntax (no constructors yet)
* (for..in) Enumerators in records
* Class and record helpers
* Generic records, arrays and procedural types
* Delphi-compatibility of generics improved
* Scoped enumerations
* Custom messages for "deprecated" directive
* Ability to use "&" for escaping keywords
* New ARM code generator features
* ARM VFPv2 and VFPv3 floating point unit support
* Thumb-2 support
Packages:
* Many improvements to the rtl
* Many improvements to the database units (fcl-db)
* Objective-Pascal interfaces to Foundation, AppKit, CoreData and WebCore
* OpenGL headers updated to OpenGL 4.0
