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Yeah, Free Pascal is far from simple. It not only tries to implement everything Delphi provides (itself never being a "simple" language) but also as much as oth

Yeah, Free Pascal is far from simple. It not only tries to implement everything Delphi provides (itself never being a "simple" language) but also as much as other Pascal dialects provide (via compiler modes) and various useful features from other languages - and that in backwards compatible ways (often via "modeswitches" - kinda like submodes). With that in mind it is kinda interesting that there are (AFAIK) three parsers for it anyway: FPC itself, lcl-passrc and Lazarus' CodeTools. It does mean that any new stuff in the language gets some time to be implemented in others though.

Rochus 3y ago
> Free Pascal is far from simple. It's still much less complex than e.g. Ada or C++, and unfortunately, the language has redundant, competing concepts that are probably explained by - as you say - putting different languages and design styles together; it's definitely not my favorite language. Unfortunately, there was also no complete and correct grammar, so I had to create one myself, and even in this one there are still productions without definition, e.g. array_constant, record_constant and procedural_constant. At least the syntax diagrams were not left recursive, and also removing ambiguous alternatives was straight forward. Surprisingly, the FP language specification does not distinguish between language variants; only the compiler knows different modes. There seems to be a common grammar for all modes.