Supported Dialects
Free Pascal adopted the de facto standard dialect of Pascal programmers, Borland Pascal and, later, Delphi. From version 2.0 on, the Delphi 7 compatibility has been continuously implemented or improved.
In fact, the project has a compilation mode concept, and the developers made it clear that they would incorporate working patches for the ANSI/ISO standardized dialects to create a standards-compliant mode.
A small effort has been made to support some of the Apple Pascal syntax, to ease interfacing to Mac OS and Mac OS X. Since the Apple dialect implements some standard Pascal features that Turbo Pascal and Delphi omit, Free Pascal is a bit more ISO-compatible than these.
The 2.2.x release series does not significantly change the dialect objectives beyond Delphi 7, instead they aim for closer compatibility. The project still lacks the Delphi functionality of compiler-supported exporting of classes from shared libraries, which is for example useful for Lazarus, which implements packages of components.
As of 2011 several Delphi 2006-specific features have been added in the current development branch, and some of the starting work for the features new in Delphi 2009 (most notably the addition of the UnicodeString type) has been done. The development branch also features an “Objective-Pascal” extension for Objective-C (Cocoa) interfacing.
The current trunk (2.7.1) version implements basic ISO Pascal mode, though many things such as Get and Put procedure and file buffer variable concept for file handling are still missing.
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