[fpc-other] I thought it was going to get better, but no

[Jacob Kroon]

On 4/27/23 01:07, HSN via fpc-other wrote:
> Thank you so much for your concerns Jacob, advocating for the “rights” 
> of pascal developers.
> That is so kind of you. How long have you been here? A month? Now that 
> definitely takes dedication..
> Please take your “help” elsewhere.The people in the channels that I 
> manage don’t want you around can you guess why?
> Don’t bother trying to sneak in under a new name to spy on us 
> either. I’ve made a private channel for all discussions of any 
> significance .
> 
> You have helped rid #fpc of two useless lurkers who never contributed 
> anything and I commend you for that.
> 

^^^
This sounds like paranoia to me.

> Now let’s have a look at your non existent code shall we?
> Please tell the nice people here about that Fpc not using “&” Instead of 
> “and”  problem of yours and that precious “code“ that can’t be defiled 
> by being fixed to work properly with fpc...
>

The code we are using is built with an old Pascal compiler called 
Pascal/MT+, its an old compiler from around 1983.

Again, the code is proprietary, I don't own it, the company I work for 
does, so I cannot just simply upload it to some public place.

If "Joanna" would bother to look in the manual here

http://www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/MTplusMan.pdf

and look on page 40, "4.3 Logical Expressions", him/her/it would see 
that the compiler uses C-style operators, like "&", for doing bitwise 
operations.

There are more incompatibilities compared to what fpc can currently 
parse, like the placement of the "external" keyword, the syntax for 
units (Pascal/MT+ calls them "modules"), the fact that local variables 
are *not* allocated on the stack by default, etc.

We are considering patching fpc to support a "Pascal/MT+" mode, but so 
far we've made good enough progress by automatically converting the 
sources with perl scripts to a dialect of Pascal that fpc can parse. And 
frankly, although "Joanna" doesn't actually represent fpc development in 
any way, the encounter with him/her/it has not been in favor of us 
contributing back to fpc, I'm sorry to say.

Jacob