[fpc-pascal] Prospects for running Lightspeed/THINK Pascal and Codewarrior Pascal with FPC

[Richard Ward]

On Aug 21, 2014, at 6:00 AM,Jerry wrote:
> 
> One of the things that I recall being possibly unique and possibly troublesome now is that under THINK Pascal, there was a built-in text I/O window and a built-in graphics drawing window, …… When I moved to Codewarrior, I was somehow able to emulate that both text and drawing windows. …….I can't remember if Codewarrior offered a drawing window or if I had to make a crude one using a (now) Carbon window.

I never made the switch to CodeWarrior and until Apple came out with the Swift Playground a couple months ago, IMO there was nothing like the LSP Text, Drawing and Instant windows.  I have been using Ingemar’s Lightweight Pascal (LWP) IDE and it has worked well for me.  By the way, the TransSkel which was mentioned is a lot more fleshed out than the original one created 20 years ago.  Ingemar has supplied a lot more library routines and functionality.  If you go this route, my opinion would be to use the Cocoa based version.   You don’t have to know anything about Cocoa to use it, but it has more future potential.  I think of most benefit for you however is the QuickDraw (called QDCG “QuickDraw Core Graphics") unit available with LWP.  You have most of the calls you had with the original QD plus new capabilities based on Core Graphics routines.  The source is available and might interesting to see how Core Graphics and Cocoa graphics work.  There is a little bit of execution speed overhead but I would be surprised if you would see it.  I use it exclusively since (for me) my code is much easier to read, write and understand in QDCG than doing it in Core Graphics.  If I decide to do write any serious code in Swift, I will probably want to port QDCG to it.  -R