Frank Heckenbach wrote:
I know Free Pascal very well. It comes with a lot of extensions, is fast and produces small binaries. But when you want to program for different platforms, you'll end up with lots of {$IfDef}s.
This is one of my main criticisms -- putting the burden of making the code portable on the programmer, rather than designing the system (as much as possible) portable by itself.
Huh? That's new to me. We try to design everything as portable as possible even taking care of non mainstream platforms.
The other one is the omission of standard Pascal features. (I'm not so much opposed to extensions, IMHO omissions are much worse.) And
from the discussions I've had/seen, this is not accidental, but
fully intentional, as there seems to be some kind of hatred and ignorance against the standards among the developers.
Well, FPC is made by some community which contributes patches and it doesn't seem so that somebody contribute a patch for a ansi mode so far which is probably useless anyways as long as the PVS isn't free in the gnu sense.
Anyways, why should somebody care? If you want a compiler trying to be iso standard compliant: use GPC; if you want a compiler trying to be Borland compatible: use FPC.
While actually many standard features would seem rather easy to add. A few, such as schemata, are probably not so easy, but actually those would provide some major benefits (in programming comfort/simplicity to the programmer), compared to the Borland "alternatives" (which can hardly be called so).