Standardized Pascal class library_(re)

Fri, 12 Sep 1997 16:27:08 +0200 (MEST)

Hi, Johan!  Hi, everybody!

According to Johan Larsson:
> [...]
> I am writing to you since I am trying to get in contact with people who
> can and want to
> port my works for the Borland dialect of Pascal to other languages such
> as Delphi,
> FPK and GNU Pascal -- and any other language which could profit by
> getting a
> standardized class library.
> [...]

(* Johan, better break your lines at column 72; otherwise it will
get hard to read after the mailers will have done it for you. ;*)

This approach (writing for more than one Pascal compiler) has obvious
advantages, but also the disadvantage that you cannot use the full power
of any of the compilers.  For instance, you cannot use function over-
loading (available in FPK Pascal), operator overloading (available in
GNU Pascal), or object properties (available in Delphi).  So the common
denominator will probably be the language of Borland Pascal 7.0.  It
should not be too hard to port a program written in this language to
GNU Pascal (speaking of recent beta versions, not of gpc-2.0).  If you
encounter any serious problems (for instance, GPC does not yet support
`Block[Read|Write]'), be invited to report them here, so we can improve
the GNU Pascal compiler until it compiles EFLIB without major changes
to the source.

> Why choose EFLIB? First of all, EFLIB will be distributed freely with
> source and all -
> that is, as soon as the juridical details have been worked out by
> Swedish layers (within a
> week or maybe a month).
> [...]

Why don't you choose the GNU LGPL as the distribution conditions?
While I am not content with *all* points in the LGPL, it's not good to
increase confusion by writing yet another license for Free Software.

> EFLIB can thus be used by any Pascal programmer
> with
> non-commercial objectives.

Read: You want to charge for commercial applications of EFLIB?

> [...] Finally, EFLIB
> is well-
> documented since almost 50% of the source code is source code comments.

Do you mean ordinary comments in the source, or do you use some system
to write the documentation into the source next to the function, so you
can extract it using another program?

Good luck,

    Peter

 Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer
peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [970201]
 maintainer GNU Pascal [970714] - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]

Peter Gerwinski (peter@agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de)