Metrowerks Pascal docs
Jonathan Hoyle
>> Pascal for the Mac. I have the 1992 book/software
>> available on Amazon, but I have been told by a rep
>> from Metrowerks that this is in fact a previous
>> version that was not much like the one that they
>> shipped for the mac until they terminated the
>> program around the turn of the century.
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Scott Moore
There are really *two* Pascal products made by Metrowerks, depending
upon time period.
The one from January 1992 is the one correctly called "Metrowerks
Pascal" [ISBN: 0023808209], sold to the educational market. It's a
"learning how to program in Pascal" book, not really a Macintosh
development environment per se. It was 68K only and came with 400K
3.5" floppies that you installed on your system (and these are not
readable on modern systems). During this time, Metrowerks also sold a
Modula-2 compiler for both the Mac and Unix environments. These
technologies were sold off in favor of Metrowerks' next product line.
In late 1993/early 1994, Metrowerks introduced CodeWarrior, their new
compiler technology. The front-end had three languages: Pascal, C and
C++, and their back-end included Mac 68K, Mac PowerPC and Windows. The
early releases were 4 times per year, but subsequently dropped to 3, 2
and finally once a year as the product grew. Initially hosted only on
the Mac, it later became hosted also on Windows with CodeWarrior Pro
in 1997.
The Pascal compiler continued to be included up until CodeWarrior Pro
4 in 1998. For Pro 5 (1999) and Pro 6 (2000), the Pascal portion was
sold as a separate product. With the Mac OS X native Pro 7 release
(2001), the Pascal compiler was no longer sold, but this final version
was made available to current registered Pascal users. Aside from Pro
7.x bug patches, no other Pascal versions were released by Metrowerks.
Note: Pro 7 does not run properly on modern Macs with current versions
of OS X. However, my copy seems to run fine if run in the Classic
Environment on a G4/G5. I do not believe any version of CodeWarrior
Pascal runs properly on modern Intel-based Macs or any Mac running Mac
OS X 10.5 Leopard.
I may be able to get for you whatever documentation Metrowerks
provided (usually in pdf format) for this Pascal development
environment. Email me and let me know.
Regards,
Jonathan Hoyle
http://www.jonhoyle.com
jonh...@mac.com
Math1723
>
> The Pascal compiler continued to be included up until CodeWarrior
> Pro 4 in 1998. For Pro 5 (1999) and Pro 6 (2000), the Pascal
> portion was sold as a separate product. With the Mac OS X native
> Pro 7 release (2001), the Pascal compiler was no longer sold, but
> this final version was made available to current registered Pascal
> users. Aside from Pro 7.x bug patches, no other Pascal versions
> were released by Metrowerks.
Minor correction: The Pascal compiler was never sold separately.
Beginning with Pro 5, it was a free download to registered CodeWarrior
users. Metrowerks promised a Mac OS X native version of Pascal prior
to its cancellation, and they kept their promise in the Pro 7
timeframe when the C/C++ tools went fullt native. (They were only
pseudo-native prior to Pro 7).
Although no new version of the Pascal compiler was ever made after
that point, they did continue to bug-fix it for a time. It's my
understanding (and I don't know this first hand) that the Pascal
compiler continued to work with later versions of CodeWarrior (version
5 all the way up to 10, the final release).
If you wish to write OS X native code in CodeWarrior Pascal (albeit
PPC/CFM only), your best bet is to find a find an old copy of
CodeWarrior 9 or 10 floating around (try Ebay) and obtain a Pascal
compiler for it. You can try contacting Freescale (the current owners
of Metrowerks technology) to see if you can get the last Pascal
compiler for the Mac (it was freely downloadable, so they should give
it to you if they still have it). If that fails, you can always
download the Gnu Pascal Compiler for Mac OS X that is a plugin for
CodeWarrior [ http://www.microbizz.nl/gpccw.html ]. This is actually
a very reasonable solution, as CodeWarrior continues to run fine (at
least on my G5 running Tiger). If you are on an Intel-based Mac
though, you will have problems debugging.
As much as I love Metrowerks' environment, I should point out that you
can use Gnu Pascal for Mac OS X without the CodeWarrior IDE. There
are both command line and Xcode versions available [ http://www.microbizz.nl/gpc.html
]. Another Mac OS X native version of Pascal you can use is Free
Pascal [ http://www.freepascal.org/fpcmac.html ]. And of course, it
is worth mentioning that a great resource for all Pascal
investigations is: http://www.pascal-central.com/ .
Note that CodeWarrior Pascal was also available for Windows.
Metrowerks stopped supporting Windows-hosted tools with version 9.4
(in early 2005), and I don't know if they continued supporting Windows
Pascal compilation even that long. Still, you can write your CW
Pascal code cross-platform and compile for both Mac & PC. For Windows
Pascal compilation though, there are numerous other Pascal
implementations that are free to obtain.
As you can tell, there are many Pascal options available today, even
for a language which is supposedly "dead". The original poster should
decide what he wishes to do with Pascal before proceeding (although
there is little harm either way, since most of his options will be
cheap or free).