About the compiler

Free Pascal is a 32-bit compiler for the i386 and m68k processors. Currently, it supports 3 operating systems:

• DOS
• LINUX
• WINDOWSNT

and work is in progress to port it to other platforms (notably, OS/2 and ).

Free Pascal is designed to be, as much as possible, source compatible with Turbo Pascal 7.0 and Delphi 4 (although this goal is not yet attained), but it also enhances these languages with elements like function overloading. And, unlike these ancestors, it supports multiple platforms.

It also differs from them in the sense that you cannot use compiled units from one system for the other.

Also, at the time of writing, there is no Integrated Development Environment (IDE) available for Free Pascal. This gap will, hopefully, be filled in the future.

Free Pascal consists of three parts :

1. The compiler program itself.
2. The Run-Time Library (RTL).
3. Utility programs and units.

Of these you only need the first two, in order to be able to use the compiler. In this document, we describe the use of the compiler. The RTL is described in the Reference guide.