Dear Developers of GNU Pascal and FPK Pascal.

I am the author of EFLIB, a free object-oriented extension for Object-Pascal which currently is evolving but will be released in a brand new version soon. Our software gets more and more mature for every day. We now want to make EFLIB a standard template library for both of your languages: GNU Pascal and FPK Pascal, and we want to support CORBA, X11, Windows NT and even Motif. Also, we want to keep the project close to the state of art in computer science. We want to incorporate only modern algorithms, modern solutions and - most importantly - only modern approaches to software reuse: the design patterns.

EFLIB is free software (http://www.csd.uu.se/projects/EFLIB/Support/FAQ/). We believe that a free mind "is-a" creative mind. However, EFLIB will also be wrapped and sold in a commercial CDROM kit. We believe that free software can indeed be commercial software as well (as do Richard Stallman for that matter). To warrant the freedom of distribution and use, we use a GNU LGPL-compatible license agreement (currently being completed by a Swedish lawyer). EFLIB is primarily a free scientific software and secondly a basis for research on software reuse, object-orientation and modern algorithms. We believe that this treble nature of EFLIB is one of its greatest strengths.

We think EFLIB will prove to be a great value for the future of Object-Pascal. We believe that the next step of programming will be an increased level of abstraction due to the introduction of design patterns and other higher-level entities of software design. We also believe in modelling and tool support for software design. We want to combine all of these things in EFLIB. We are also considering integrating modern technologies such as CORBA and Motif support. The trend goes to language and platform independence and universal modelling and reuse, and that's exactly what EFLIB is all about.

I am, as the project leader of EFLIB, confident that EFLIB will fit actual needs as an official standardized class library for FPK Pascal and GNU Pascal, and partially for Borland Delphi 3. However, to reach this goal I will need collaboration from all of you. Many people have already reacted positively to EFLIB in the FPK and GNU domain. First of all, we need developers who can help us with the actual coding and testing, and give us response to the specifications. We need experienced CORBA / ORB / DCOM developers. We need experts on design patterns and reuse, and experienced developers in X11, Motif and Windows NT. We also need some changes in the GNU and FPK Pascal standards: full support for properties, class model and exception handling. It could well be time for a precise standard to settle between GNU and FPK.

Some links to the project:

http://www.csd.uu.se/projects/EFLIB/ http://www.csd.uu.se/projects/EFLIB/Documentation/Documents/Specifications/ http://www.csd.uu.se/projects/EFLIB/Developing/

ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/lang/EFLIB/ ftp://ftp.csd.uu.se/users/jola/EFLIB/

Best Regards, Johan Larsson

URL: http://www.csd.uu.se/~jola/ MAIL: jola@csd.uu.se

Also, REMEMBER to check out EFLIB, the free object-oriented framework for EVERY Pascal programmer, at http://ftp.sunet.se/EFLIB/. Simply SOPHISTICATED!