Advantages of Free Pascal
Advantages of programming in Pascal and Free Pascal
Maybe you think, why should I choose Pascal instead of, for example C. Or
maybe you are comparing Free Pascal to another Pascal compiler. Well, in
that case, be sure to read this page before making your decision. Well,
for what is Free Pascal so good?
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Very clean language Pascal is a very nice language,
your programs will be more readable and maintainable than for example in
C, and let's even forget about C++. And you don't need to give up the
power, the Pascal language is as powerful as you want it.
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No Makefiles Unlike most programming languages,
Pascal does not need Makefiles. You can save huge amounts of time, the
compiler just figures out itself which files need to be recompiled.
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Pascal compilers are Fast with a big F and Free Pascal
is no exception. Yes, you no longer need to grow roots while
compiling your programs, just hit the compile key and it's done, even
for large programs.
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Each unit has it's own identifiers In Pascal you
never need to worry about polluting the namespace, like in C where
an identifier needs to be unique accross the entire program. No, in
Pascal each unit gets it's own namespace and that's very relaxed.
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High speed, low memory use Being a language that is
compiled into fast machine code by a modern compiler, Free Pascal
has been able to make Pascal one of the fastest languages there are.
Further, Free Pascal programs tend to use little memory.
For comparison with other languages we suggest the
Shootout benchmark
and recommend you modify the weights to your own taste.
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Integrated development environment Free Pascal comes
with an IDE which work on several platforms, in which you can write, compile
and debug your programs. You will save huge amounts of time using the IDE,
the best programming friend you have.
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Great integration with assembler Do you think pascal is
for wimps who need to learn programming? WRONG! It's excellent for high tech
programming and for the supreme nerds among you we have the integrated
assemblers. You can easily mix assembler code and Pascal code, in the
language you wish? Prefer Intel styled assembler? No problem, if it's needed
Free Pascal will convert it to ATT for you. Do you want to convert your
program into a source file for Nasm? No problem, and all ATT assembler in
your source files is automatically converted.
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Object oriented programming And if you do the serious
programming, you are of course very interested in object oriented
programming. Use the Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal ways of OOP according
to your taste. The FCL and Free Vision and provide you with the powerful
object libraries you need. For your database needs we support PostgreSQL,
MySQL, Interbase and ODBC.
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Smartlinking Free Pascal's smart linker leaves out any
variable or code that you do not use. That makes small programs small with
a big S, while they are still statically linked, avoiding DLL hell!
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Distribution independence (Linux) As a result of this,
software compiled by the Linux version of Free Pascal runs on any
Linux distribution, making it much, much, easier to make your software
support multiple Linux distributions.
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Available for a lot of platforms on several architectures
Free Pascal is
available for more platforms than most other Pascal compilers and allows
easy cross-compiling, just change the target in the IDE and compile! And
there is work going on for even more platforms and processors.
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Compatible Have existing code? Free Pascal is more
compatible with it than any other Pascal compiler. We are almost completely
compatible with Turbo Pascal and quite well compatible with Delphi source
code. If you have code in another language, like C or assembler, just
use favorite compiler for it and call it from Free Pascal.
