[fpc-other] Re: [fpc-pascal] Pascal dialect -- was: Re: fpc-pascal Digest, Vol 72, Issue 12

[Florian Klaempfl]

> 
> You are living a dream if you think they care about FPC, so why the
> hell care about them. 

As said before, a lot of fpc users care, see bug tracker. And as long as
I didn't care much about TP, FPC was a one man show: from 1993 to 1996 I
developed FPC alone and cared only little about TP, this is also why FPC
source files have the extension .pp: at the very beginning I planned to
create a compiler for a language I invented called Pascal++ (this is
also why it had procedure overloading and exceptions from the very
beginning; early compilers even had no pascal like read/write(ln)) and
use it for my chess programs :) The chess programs were written in TP,
but I missed 32 bit and several language features and I wanted to kick
TP compatibility from them as soon as my Pascal++ compiler called FPK
Pascal would be ready. Very similiar thoughts as yours.

The sad thing was: nobody was interested in this language and compiler.
Then a very good friend of mine wrote a tp compatible crt unit and
convinced me to implement some features like pascal like write/read(ln).
After this was done, suddenly, several people started to use FPK Pascal
to translate their programs. At this pointer I realized that for a
success of the compiler it's important to make compromisses between the
needs of users and my ideas. If I didn't do so, FPK Pascal would have
probably died in the mid-nineties a silent death on my hard disk and I
would have continued to work on FreeWin95 (the very beginnings of
ReactOS) instead on FPC :)