[fpc-pascal]Introduction

[Stephen Hurd]

Sorry I asked a question before introducing myself, I try to stay out of the
habit, but it was driving me nuts...

Anyways... Hello, I'm Stephen Hurd.  I live in Springside, Saskatchewan,
Canada and I am a professional perl programmer.  Recently, in my spare time
I've been porting some of the old BBS software over to *NIX as almost all of
it seems to be written in pascal (which I hadn't touched for about 3-4 years
until about three weeks ago).  Because I run FreeBSD, I started using GNU
pascal... I was impressed.  I fiddled with it for about 2 weeks, and
actually got a version of TradeWars up and running.  So then I moved on to
LORD IGMs (In Game Modules)... as LORD is in the process of being ported to
Linux, I felt that there should be a few IGMs available for it too.  So I
pulled the source for one of the IGMs and did my usual "try and at least
make it build" in GNU pascal.  After about three days of wrestling with the
thing, I turned to some of the guys on the official LORD support IRC
channel.  The one guy there (zoob) mentioned that he used Free Pascal and
found it pretty easy to port software over.  So I went to the site and
grabbed a copy, and ended up with only about 50 errors I had to fix to get
it to build (note I didn't say work)  Much better.  Throw in the fact that I
didn't have to keep my variable type translation table handy, and you've got
a pretty nice and easy port.  It would be nice if the FreeBSD port was
further along, but you can't ask for everything.

As an interesting note, the Linux version runs great under FreeBSD with the
linux compatability layer... generating nice linux programs.

So keep up the good work, I should ask stupid questions like the last one
more than twice a month.