On Wednesday 01 September 2004 13:47, Nadav Har'El wrote: > No, I'm talking after doing "apropos pascal" on my system and not > finding any Pascal compiler on my system. Pascal is simply *much* > less common on Linux (or any other Unix system).
Why would that be a problem ? As I don't expect end users to have C++ compilers to use KDE, I don't expect them to have Pascal compilers to use a program written in Pascal. Developers can easily to 'urpmi fpc' (or the equivalent in your distro of choice) and have a pascal compiler for their distribution. As gcc was probably not installed by default on your computer and you had to do it manually, I don't understand why you'd expect a Pascal compiler to be different. > Moreover, Pascal is much less standardized than C because its > original core was rather weak Same as for C. As of standards, IIRC a C ISO standard was only accepted by late 1990s while Pascal was standardized as early as 1982. I'm not sure how you can call this "less standardized". Its true that there are a several Pascal dialects which offer somewhat different semantics - same as for C: each C compiler (even those that claim to be "standard compliant" and you won't find many of those) implement their own extensions and encourage people to write non-portable programs. Having developed in Pascal since early 1980s and doing C for about 8 years or so, I can guarantee that the situation is far worse in C then in Pascal (mainly as currently Pascal is mostly dominated by the Borland dialect while in the C world there isn't such a monopol on compilers). > (google for "pascal why not"!), Read that article and most of the points he raises weren't valid by the time I did most of my Pascal programming (late 1980s, early 1990s). > and its > GUI stuff is even less standarized. Yea ? Like with what other programming language it is ? And if you pull Java on me - I'll scream. The GUI issue is relevant only the availability of language bindings for graphical toolkits (which are mostly written in C) and is by no means a deficiency of the language. If you can solve this problem adequately (and I think there are several valid solutions) then that shouldn't prevent you from writing in Pascal - exactly the same as in C and other language. > I doubt that fpc, or anything of > this sort, will be able to compile Qtext without major work. Same as any porting work from Win32 to Linux. Having done such things myself (porting Pascal programs from Win32 to fpc on windows and Linux, as well as ports using other languages), I'd expect the experience will be generally much less traumatizing then doing a port from Visual-C to gcc. FPC supports to a large degree of the Borland Delphi syntax (which was used to write QText) and as library incompatibilities would likely be minimized by the fact that the VCL (Delphi's native GUI toolkit) is available as source and binaries on Linux for free, I think this would probably much easier to do then if QText had been written in some other language. > But > again, I'm not speaking from experience. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yep ;-) -- Oded ::.. Rick: "How can you close me up? On what grounds?" Renault: "I'm shocked! Shocked! To find that gambling is going on here." Croupier (handing money to Renault): "Your winnings, sir." Renault:"Oh. Thank you very much." -- Casablanca ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
