Using and Maintaining GNU Pascal

Jan-Jaap van der Heijden

and

Peter Gerwinski

Last updated Jul 1998

for alpha version 980705 (GCC version 2.8.1) Copyright (C) 1988, 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

For GPC alpha version 980705 (GCC version 2.8.1)

Published by the Free Software Foundation
59 Temple Place - Suite 330
Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the sections entitled "GNU General Public License," "Funding for Free Software," and "Protect Your Freedom--Fight `Look And Feel'" are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that the sections entitled "GNU General Public License," "Funding for Free Software," and "Protect Your Freedom--Fight `Look And Feel'", and this permission notice, may be included in translations approved by the Free Software Foundation instead of in the original English.

Welcome to GNU Pascal, ...

... the free 32-bit Pascal compiler from the GNU family!

The purpose of the GNU Pascal project is to produce a Pascal compiler (called GNU Pascal or GPC) which

• combines the clarity of Pascal with powerful tools suitable for real-life programming,
• supports both the Pascal standard and the Extended Pascal standard as defined by ISO, ANSI and IEEE (ISO 7185:1990, ISO/IEC 10206:1991, ANSI/IEEE 770X3.160-1989),
• supports other Pascal standards (UCSD Pascal, Borland Pascal, Pascal-SC) in so far as this serves the goal of clarity and usability,
• may be distributed under normal GNU license conditions, and
• can generate code for and run on any computer for which the GNU C compiler can generate code and run on.

Pascal was originally designed for teaching. GNU Pascal provides a smooth way to proceed to challenging programming tasks without learning a completely different language.

The GNU Pascal compiler is part of the GNU Compiler family combining a language independent part of the GNU Compiler (GCC) with a Pascal specific front end. Other compilers of the family currently include compilers for the Ada, C, C++, Objective C, and FORTRAN languages.

This documentation contains

• the GNU General Public License which informs you about your rights and responsibilites when using, modifying and distributing GNU Pascal, see section GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE,
• other texts about Free Software and the GNU Project intended to answer questions like "what is GNU?" you might have in mind now, see section Funding Free Software, section Protect Your Freedom--Fight "Look And Feel", and section The GNU Manifesto,
• a list of contributors where you can read who is responsible for all the bugs and trouble you are going to have with GNU Pascal, see section Contributors to GNU Pascal,
• installation instructions, see section Installing GNU Pascal,
• and the current version of a "GNU Pascal manual" intended to describe how to use the compiler. (Sorry about this--it's rather incomplete and outdated.)

If you are familiar with Standard Pascal (ISO 7185) programming, you can probably just go ahead and try to compile your programs. (If something does not work, see section Known bugs and inconveniences; how to report bugs.) The ISO Extended Pascal Standard (ISO 10206) is only partially implemented into GNU Pascal, see section GNU Pascal extensions.

If you are a Borland Pascal programmer, you should probably start reading the QuickStart guide from Borland to GNU Pascal, see section From Borland Pascal to GNU Pascal. If you are curious about the Extended Pascal Standard which is a standardized high-level Pascal, read the comparision between ISO Extended Pascal and Borland Pascal, section About Pascal and Extended Pascal languages.

In case you run into something which you consider a bug in GNU Pascal, read the included bug list, section Known bugs and inconveniences; how to report bugs. In that chapter you can also find information how to report the bug and how to get quick help.

And, please, think about how you can contribute to the GNU Pascal project, too. Remember that we, the authors of GNU Pascal and of the documentation you are reading right now, do not get money for this job. Please support our work by contributing yours in form of example programs, bug reports, documentation, or even actual improvements of the compiler. A "wish list" is included; see section How you can contribute to GNU Pascal.