Some Free Pascal Hobby Stuff

Free Pascal is a very good Turbo Pascal clone free on many systems. This includes the AROS system, which is getting better each release. It is Amiga source compatible, and as the C dev environment is up, but no IDE on AROS, the FPC IDE works a treat, and with restrictions allows cross development of source for AROS, Windows, Mac, Linux and quite a few other targets.

7/11/2018 – There is just the start of an outline. I have abstracted out some of the CLI parameter management to make it easy to make a multi-purpose CLI tool to start. This I am calling CliFly and could be expanded with simple procedures and filling out the table of recognized verbs.

9/11/2018 – There is now a fully compiling set of management words and a framework to build in some new words with more useful active utility. The ones already there could be considered foundation words, supporting the search, help and test structure. A module can be easily added by making a unit which uses “GenericProcess” for dealing with exit and getting parameters. I will extend the foundation units to supply what I find useful, such as the “CS” function idiom for string compare truth. “getParse(errName)” is also there to get parameters, and print an error from a labelled routine name if no parameters are left.

13/11/2018 – I’m thinking of making a chunk based file format for the project. Based on PNG to start, and then expand from there.

17/11/2018 – Unit U437 is for “character code pages” to Unicode translations. It will likely end up being a synthetic terminal of sorts. It does provide some format conversion functions, and so is likely to get a verb or two.

20/11/2018 – I did my own error recovering Unicode translation in the end, as the exceptions do not point to the location of the errors in the buffers. For mangled recovered files, this maybe important. There is also transparent conversion on oversized codepoints to the error character “skull and cross bones” for all my Unicode processing needs. Apart from a few render wrappers, the next thing is data compression and indexing, and of course getting down to some file wrappers.

26/11/2018 – So added a Unicode UTF8 to UGSI, so I can then design a 512 character charset, and a processing methodology for say diacritical marks. Also exceptions, file classes and the basics of the internationalization of the help text has been put together. The next thing is to put the GenericProcess unit in line with using these. As soon as that’s done, then it’s on to ADTs.