Hi, Johan! Hi, everybody!

According to Johan Larsson:

[...] I am writing to you since I am trying to get in contact with people who can and want to port my works for the Borland dialect of Pascal to other languages such as Delphi, FPK and GNU Pascal -- and any other language which could profit by getting a standardized class library. [...]

(* Johan, better break your lines at column 72; otherwise it will get hard to read after the mailers will have done it for you. ;*)

This approach (writing for more than one Pascal compiler) has obvious advantages, but also the disadvantage that you cannot use the full power of any of the compilers. For instance, you cannot use function over- loading (available in FPK Pascal), operator overloading (available in GNU Pascal), or object properties (available in Delphi). So the common denominator will probably be the language of Borland Pascal 7.0. It should not be too hard to port a program written in this language to GNU Pascal (speaking of recent beta versions, not of gpc-2.0). If you encounter any serious problems (for instance, GPC does not yet support `Block[Read|Write]'), be invited to report them here, so we can improve the GNU Pascal compiler until it compiles EFLIB without major changes to the source.

Why choose EFLIB? First of all, EFLIB will be distributed freely with source and all - that is, as soon as the juridical details have been worked out by Swedish layers (within a week or maybe a month). [...]

Why don't you choose the GNU LGPL as the distribution conditions? While I am not content with *all* points in the LGPL, it's not good to increase confusion by writing yet another license for Free Software.

EFLIB can thus be used by any Pascal programmer with non-commercial objectives.

Read: You want to charge for commercial applications of EFLIB?

[...] Finally, EFLIB is well- documented since almost 50% of the source code is source code comments.

Do you mean ordinary comments in the source, or do you use some system to write the documentation into the source next to the function, so you can extract it using another program?

Good luck,

Peter

Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [970201] maintainer GNU Pascal [970714] - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]