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> tex is written in pascal; Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI https://www.youtube.com/live

> tex is written in pascal; Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures https://youtu.be/jbrMBOF61e0 https://youtu.be/jbrMBOF61e0 : If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source? Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Well, GCC (as in GNU compiler collection) probably has a frontend, but that still does not answer the question about maintenance. These were just thoughts. Of course researching the answers would not be overly complicated.

anon7725 3y ago
> Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Of course https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/
- usr1106 3y ago
  Nice. Although "latest news" are from 2021.
  - renewedrebecca 3y ago
    It's not like Pascal changes a whole lot.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    Free Pascal does very infrequent releases though the compiler is under active development and even has a bunch of new features both for the compiler (e.g. a wasm backend) and the language itself. There are always multiple daily commits in the git log by several developers.
  - anta40 3y ago
    The discussions in Gitlab are still active: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues Of course, you can always build the latest version from Git.
svat 3y ago
> If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source? If you install TeX via the usual ways–TeX Live and MikTeX are the most common—then the build step runs a program (like web2c) to convert the Pascal source (with changes) to C, then uses a C compiler. (So the Pascal source is still used, but the Pascal "compiler" is a specialized Pascal-to-C translator.) But there is also TeX-FPC (https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-fpc https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-fpc), a small set of change (patch) files to make TeX compilable with the Free Pascal compiler (https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/ https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/). For more details see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111332/how-to-compile-the-source-code-of-tex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111332/how-to-compil...

anon7725 3y ago

> Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Of course https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/

usr1106 3y ago
Nice. Although "latest news" are from 2021.
- renewedrebecca 3y ago
  It's not like Pascal changes a whole lot.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  Free Pascal does very infrequent releases though the compiler is under active development and even has a bunch of new features both for the compiler (e.g. a wasm backend) and the language itself. There are always multiple daily commits in the git log by several developers.
- anta40 3y ago
  The discussions in Gitlab are still active: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues Of course, you can always build the latest version from Git.

svat 3y ago

> If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source? If you install TeX via the usual ways–TeX Live and MikTeX are the most common—then the build step runs a program (like web2c) to convert the Pascal source (with changes) to C, then uses a C compiler. (So the Pascal source is still used, but the Pascal "compiler" is a specialized Pascal-to-C translator.) But there is also TeX-FPC (https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-fpc https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-fpc), a small set of change (patch) files to make TeX compilable with the Free Pascal compiler (https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/ https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/). For more details see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111332/how-to-compile-the-source-code-of-tex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111332/how-to-compil...