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

[Stefan Monnier]

>> > 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.)

Hmm... so we should rename delphi.el to something else, since we don't
like packages that are dedicated to supporting proprietary software.
>From the above I gather than the language part of Delphi is basically
the same as Free Pascal, so maybe we could rename it free-pascal.el?

>> > 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.

OK.  Indeed from looking at them there didn't seem to be much shared
ancestry.  Do you happen to know what major dialect of Pascal is
supported by pascal-mode?

> 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.

Merging seems difficult, indeed.  But at least from what you say, it
seems like it would be desirable to try and shape future changes so as
to reduce the differences rather than increase them.


        Stefan