Press Kit

This page is designed for background information for people who want to cover Free Pascal related news. It can be used freely any use; no copyrights will be claimed.

What is Free Pascal

Free Pascal is an open source Pascal compiler. Work started in 1993 by Florian KlÀmpfl. Since 1993 Free Pascal has evolved into an advanced piece of technology. Nowadays it is widely considered one best Pascal compilers ever written.

Free Pascal is not just a compiler. The Free Pascal development team writes and maintains:

• The compiler
• A runtime library for many operating systems
• Many software libraries
• Interfaces to many software libraries written in C
• An integrated development environment
• A set of manuals

What is Lazarus

Lazarus is a sister project of Free Pascal. Its aim is to provide an integrated graphical development environment for designing applications. It specializes in creating modern GUI applications at great ease.

The Lazarus team designs and maintains:

• The Lazarus development environment
• The Lazarus component library of GUI widgets

The Lazarus development environment is currently more advanced than any other open source development environment.

Platforms and architectures

Free Pascal is available for the following platforms:

• 32-bit Dos (GO32V2 dos extender) (Dos support will return in upcoming version 2.0.2)
• Microsoft Windows Win32
• FreeBSD
• Linux/ARM
• Linux/i386
• Linux/powerpc
• Linux/sparc
• Linux/x86_64
• MacOS Classic
• MacOS X
• MorphOS
• Novell Netware
• OS/2

Free Pascal has also supported the following platforms in the past:

• AmigaOS/m68000
• NetBSD/i386
• NetBSD/m68000
• Solaris
• Beos
• QNX

Free Pascal programs can usually be recompiled for different platforms without large code changes. Portability is heavily dependand on code architecture, however, the Free Pascal runtime library bridges the gap between Unix (Posix) derived platforms and Dos derived platforms quite well.

Lazarus is available for Linux, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS X. The aim is to make programs useable on all three platforms without code changes.

The Pascal language

The Pascal language has a rich history. It was designed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth and introduced the concept of structural programming. This revolutionarized programming and the ideas behind it has inspired many other programming languages.

Pascal is a language that has evolved a lot through the years. One of the revolutions inspired by Pascal was byte code, first pioneered in the USCD P-system, today the basis of Java and .NET.

Turbo Pascal introduced another revolution, the Integrated Development Environment. Programs could now be written quicker than ever. Turbo Pascal introduced many enhancement to the Pascal language, including object oriented programming.

While innovations in its successor, Delphi, were not entirely new to the world, Delphi is regarded as one of the best development environments in existance. Delphi enhanced the language as well and prepared it for the next decades.

While Pascal has evolved a lot, it has unmistakenly remained itself and remained close to the original spirit.

The Free Pascal project is dedicated to promote the use of the Pascal language. We are also dedicated to free software. The Free Pascal development team wants to provide the tools that make Pascal an as realistic option as other mainstream languages and believes the use of the Pascal language leads to better software.