Hi,

I'm currently evaluating the possibility to use Linux for our applications in some cases. Our applications are written in OP (Delphi) and I've had a quick look at gpc and fpc. Well, the area where I imagine using Linux are server applications, and I hope to find a solution to use (widely) the same code-base for the NT-version and the Linux-version. Since these applications usually don't have a GUI, the visual part of the VCL is not the problem. And other parts can be easily ported. Anyway, I've read that GPC's focus is on portability. That's great. But I see no reason not to support the non-windows specific things. I know, OP is not based on a standard like Extended Pascal, /but/ I think OP /is/ the standard, because I can't imagine that any other Pascal-dialect is that widely used. Anyway, I've not check GPC very deeply, yet, so some of my statements might be wrong. Ok, here is what I'd like to see:

- Compatibility with OP (Delphi) as far as possible w/o leaving the portabil ity-track. (Beside some features like message-handler-methods, there should not be much) - Exception handling - OP-style object-model - OP-style strings (reference-counted or not)

However, IMO it is great, that Pascal is going to be supported in the UNIX-world. It is a under-estimated langugage (esp. OP), IMO.

Andreas