虽然一直关注着，不过上个月比较忙，5月中发布的FreePascal 2.0，竟然我今天才知道

以下文章来自：http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news%5fid=10607
Posted by special contributor Daniël Mantione on 2005-05-16 18:38:25 UTC

After five years of development, Free Pascal 2.0 is ready. With the new compiler, its authors believe they are ready to become a larger open source development platform. In the MS-DOS world, Pascal was one of the major programming languages and is by means of Borland Delphi an important programming language in the Windows world. In the open source world, Free Pascal is the leading Pascal compiler and while open source is a bit biased using the C language, the Pascal language has a lot to offer to open source programmers.

Free Pascal is a GPL compiler for 32-bit and 64-bit CPU architectures such as Intel 32/64 bit, AMD 32/64 bit, SPARC, PowerPC and Intel ARM. It is language compatible to Turbo Pascal, Delphi (till version 7), and partly Metrowerks Pascal. It supports many operating systems: Dos, Linux, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, Novell Netware, Mac OS classic, Mac OS X and MorphOS.

It comes with a cross-platform Run-Time Library, many interfaces to existing libraries, and a large set of non-visual classes in the Free Component Library. Last but not least, a text-mode IDE exists on various platforms, and FPC comes with 1800 pages of documentation.

What is new when compared to version 1.0 ?

– More supported CPUs:
AMD64, SPARC, PPC (32 bit), ARM.
– More supported platforms:
Mac OS classic, Mac OS X, MorphOS, Novell Netware.
– Improved inlining
– Improved register variables
– Improved 80×86 assembler optimizer
– Threading support.
– Rudimentary variant support.
– Interfaces support.
– WideString support.
– More Delphi compatibility units.
– Greatly improved database access.
– New compiler mode:
MACPAS for compatibility with Pascal compilers on Mac OS.
– Complete documentation of RTL units, generated using a new documentation tool, included in the distribution: fpdoc
– Completely rewritten Unix support.
– Completely rewritten compiler, allowing for easier ports to new architectures.
– IDE
– Free Vision text-mode windowing system.
– Many new packages.
– And of course, Numerous bugfixes.

2. Why Pascal?

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