[fpc-pascal] Development for Symbian OS (S60 5th edition)

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

There is code enough to make some hello world applications for the UIQ
3 simulator, but nothing for real devices. Unfortunately several
design flaws in the Symbian architecture make the work of creating a
compiler for it much harder then necessary. The flaws include
providing a x86 simulator with a different architecture and toolchain
from the real device instead of an arm emulator like there is for
PocketPC, which alone is a huge problem, plus a crazy toolchain which
needs tons of Perl code and batch scripts to be used and to complete
the mess each Symbian Toolkit is incompatible with the other ones (and
themselves in different versions), and they are all written in C++,
which adds to the difficulty in creating a native compiler for the
target.

All of this made the work of porting the compiler for UIQ much harder
then I initially imagined it would be (and then it should be too).

In fact their architecture is so flawed and changes so much between
toolkits and versions that I think that trying to port Free Pascal to
Java Bytecode (which runs on Symbian systems) would have been a better
choice. At least it's a stable target with emulators and an easy to
use toolchain with the Jasmin assembler.

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho