Best Pascal IDE

[cwarn23]

Hi, I am starting to learn Pascal as a personal project but need an IDE/compiler. Does anybody know of a good IDE+compiler in one that they use which has the usual features like line numbers and decent debuggers. Also I need a compiler which is not written in C or C++ but rather a compiler that is written in Punch Cards or the language that the original Pascal compilers were written in. Please advice. cwarn23

[TrustyTony]

What you mean Punch Cards, that is media, not computer language.

Language of implementation is typicallyl Pascal, so the compiler is self hosting:

The first Pascal compiler was designed in Zürich for the CDC 6000 series mainframe computer family. Niklaus Wirth reports that a first attempt to implement it in Fortran in 1969 was unsuccessful due to Fortran's inadequacy to express complex data structures. The second attempt was formulated in the Pascal language itself and was operational by mid-1970. Many Pascal compilers since have been similarly self-hosting, that is, the compiler is itself written in Pascal, and the compiler is usually capable of recompiling itself when new features are added to the language, or when the compiler is to be ported to a new environment. The GNU Pascal compiler is one notable exception, being written in C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_%28programming_language%29

[cwarn23]

What you mean Punch Cards, that is media, not computer language.

Punch Cards is where you make a program by manually setting the ones and zeros in a series of cards (punching holes if you will) and feeding those cards into a computer with a compiler. That then compiles the compiler which in this case would be the pascal compiler. I'm not sure how many people still do this today but I'm hoping I can get a pascal compiler written in that form or not far off because many compilers today have many layers of complexity where it follows the following script if you will.

compiler=punch_cards
while (language_insufficiant) {
compiler += compiler(another_language);
}

So as you can see the compiler gets more complex each time a new language is invented there by hogging more memory, slowing down cpu time, delaying speeds. That is why I need a pascal compiler which was written in punch cards or has been programmed from a compiler which was programmed directly in binary and not another compiler.

[TrustyTony]

Looks like you are confusing issues: language used to write compiler and end product of compiler produces. Compiler written in Scheme could produce linkable assembler, which could suffice, or Java byte code or C++.

[cwarn23]

Looks like you are confusing issues: language used to write compiler and end product of compiler produces. Compiler written in Scheme could produce linkable assembler, which could suffice, or Java byte code or C++.

Could you please explain in more simple context because I could only understand as far as "of compiler produces" then I got confused by the rest.

[tungnk1993]

Lazarus is a good Pascal IDE

[cwarn23]

So what language is Lazarus written in?

[thekilon]

Lazarus is made in Free Pasca a language very similar to Delphi.

[Schol-R-LEA]

@Thekilon: You should check the dates of a thead before posting to it. The original conversation ceased over nine months ago.

For the record, in the unlikely case that the original poster is still interested in this thread, I believe that by 'punch cards' the OP is referring to machine code, the specific encoding of CPU operations in binary. Few if any programs have been written this way since the late 1940s, after the first assembly languages were introduced, though in the 1960s and 1970s it wasn't uncommon to have to toggle in a small machine code bootstrap program when starting a computer. I find it unlikely that any Pascal compiler was ever written in machine code directly, and very few were written in assembly language (one that I can think of was the original Turbo Pascal, but that was very much of an unusual case even in the early 1980s). The majority of Pascal compilers have been self-hosting, as pyTony stated, using either a cross-compiler or a p-code interpreter to port the compiler to new systems when needed.

[finalist]

I know about two IDE's, each one uses some variant of Pascal:
1. Delphi (Embarcadero Delphi XE) - uses a Borland Pascal language;
2. Lazarus - uses a Free Pascal language - ( Lazarus is FREE).