Re: Delphi, Pascal, delphi-mode, pascal-mode, and free software

[Simon South]

On Fri, 2010-09-10 at 13:05 +0200, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Can someone enlighten me on the status of Delphi w.r.t Free Software?
> > AFAICT it's proprietary (and there's a Free Software alternative called
> > Lazarus which is IIUC a sort of library for Free Pascal).

Yes, that's correct.  (Well, I believe Lazarus is more an
IDE-slash-RAD-tool than a set of libraries.  But yes, the idea is that
Lazarus + Free Pascal would be a free replacement for Delphi.)

> > Also, what's the relationship between pascal-mode and delphi-mode?
> > Is there some overlap between the two, should there be more overlap,
> > or less?

Each of these targets a different major dialect of Pascal and is
completely separate from the other.  Having a single mode might be nice
but I think writing a parser that would (neatly) handle both dialects
would be a big challenge.  Plus I seem to recall the two modes are quite
different architecturally at the moment, so at least one would need to
be rewritten.

-- 
Simon South
address@hidden