[fpc-devel]FreePascal International Proyect

[adrian15 at europe.com]

FreePascal International Proyect

   As you may know I'm trying to translate Pascal into "Spanish Pascal". And 
it's very difficult. I would like to propose you one thing before it's too late.

   Somewhere I've read that you're rewriting completely the code (in order to 
make it faster?). Well, here is my proposal.

But first a little analogy: 

====
I was reading an article in a computer magazine and it said that if Microsoft 
had sold so many DOS and so many Windows it was because his O.Ss where pirated 
(copied ilegally). It lost money, but more and more had his O.S. and later... 
we know the history he has the monopoly.
====

  What I would like to do is make a sort of "internalization" of Pascal. 
Nowadays a lot of schools and universities are teaching Pascal because is one 
of the most easy and powerful language. (Although we all know that Delphi has 
to come because it's OOP).

  Well, I think it would be easier for these French, Scandinavian, Russian, 
Spanish, German,... people to program in his/her own language.

  Little by little people will use their own language version of FreePascal and 
then when they became professional, the English one. But these people would be 
less likely to program in C, Perl, Asp, or whatever language, because they 
would have learnt Pascal being childs.

  Ok. Let's talk about the improvements on code to make it easier to translate 
FreePascal. You we'll have to use a common library called i.e. translat.pp, 
this one will have a constant like the one in tokens.pas:

ttoken and arraytokeninfo.

   This file will take in account more reserved words, (rtl keywords and 
package standard keywords) because I've seen that you have them <past 
participle of spread> in many files, up to the moment:

psystem.inc, tokens.pas, ra386att.pas

  What about compatibility? How will we be able to come back to normal 
(English) Pascal?

   Well,... this file translat.pp, will have another constant, which will be 
for standard English tokens.
   A function, procedure or whatever will be determine the English tokens that 
are not used by new <language> Pascal.

For instance if in Pascal/Hispascal we have:

const  const
var var 
procedure procedimiento
program programa

const and var will not be in the list (the red/forbiden list), but procedure 
and program yes. 

   That's too say there will be treated as tokens (you could not define a 
variable, or a const, or a procedure, or a function, or anything with them) but 
there will not have a function, in the code. They will be unuseful.

    Of course, this forbiden list checking will be an option, always by  
default, but you could change it if you wanted to.

   This red/forbidden list it's because it will be easier to make programs to 
translate from <language> Pascal to Pascal. No need to rename some tokens if 
they are not what they mean in Pascal but variables or other things.

   And... that's all. Think about the schools, and they opportunity of making 
programming genius, because they are a lot of potential genius, but if they 
have to learn English to make a program, some of them don't do it.

  I'm going to hibernate (to study June exams) but if I see that you haven't 
made any effort to make this international proyect,... don't even doubt that I 
will go on translating Free Pascal into Spanish or Hispascal, and, of course, 
asking you doubts.

  See you in the future,
adrian15.

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