New Palm Pascal Compiler Coming from Philippe Guillot

[WILL]

Some of you may know Philippe Guillot as the creator and head of the Palm Pascal Compiler project. Well he has already made one of the first open source native Pascal compilers for the PalmOS handhelds. Now, he's going back to the drawing board and writing a newer and better compiler with the ISO Standard Pascal syntax for the PalmOS platform. In an announcement in late September he stated the following goals of this new compiler to be written with the existing PP Compiler.

:arrow: ISO Standard Pascal compiler, rewritten in PP Pascal and souce code available
:arrow: Full ARM native code generation that leads to more than 10 x faster code
:arrow: 64 bits reals
:arrow: Integrated ARM assembler
:arrow: Documentation with code samples


Just this last Wednesday, Mr. Guillot just announced the release of the new 'Native ARM Palm Pascal Compiler' that is currently availible on their website which is now at version 3.04.


Many may not know this but this team has also translated the Official Palm OS SDK and released it on the PPCompiler.org site. More information about that is availible at this thread (http://www.ppcompiler.org/thread.php?lng=en&pg=3338&id=9&fid=&cat=3).


For more information about the Palm Pascal compiler project or just PalmOS development in general, visit PPCompiler.org (http://www.ppcompiler.org/?lng=en)!

[JernejL]

Nice.. but only if palm platform didn't stagnate that much. he should rather focus to symbian or windows ce..

[savage]

:arrow: ISO Standard Pascal compiler, rewritten in PP Pascal and souce code available

Though Standard complaince is good, the problem here is that Delphi *is* the Pascal standard and it does not conform to the ISO Pascal standard. GNU Pascal is very ISO compliant, but it is falling out of favour with many Pascal developers.

[dmantione]

If you look a bit broader, the standard is UCSD Pascal. Both Borland and Apple implemented their compilers compatible to UCSD.

UCSD and ISO standard Pascal are not mutually exclusive, i.e. the Mac Pascal dialect is both ISO and UCSD compliant. However, the trouble starts with ISO extended Pascal: You cannot implement UCSD and ISO extended at the same time. By publishing Extended Pascal, ISO made itself irrelevant, since all compilers in use were UCSD compatible. Companies weren't happy to switch to ISO; implementing ISO extended would mean all code in existance would be useless. Borland went their own way, inventing their own extensions.

IMO it is not wrong that PP compiler implements ISO standard Pascal. But also make sure you understand the UCSD dialect, and if you have that then go for the Borland dialect. Ignore ISO extended Pascal, if PP compiler goes that way, it is a dead born child.

[WILL]

Does anyone here actually own a Palm? :)

[marcov]

Does anyone here actually own a Palm? :)

Yes, I have a M515 (and another PDA, a Zaurus SL5500). But this is a m68k Palm, not an arm one. Most of the cheap (and older) Palms are m68k.

I'm not going to waste my time on something not Delphi compat though in this day and age. Maybe FPC will support it again some day.