The Purpose of GNU Pascal

The purpose of the GNU Pascal project is to produce a Pascal compiler (called GNU Pascal or GPC) which

• combines the clarity of Pascal with powerful tools suitable for real-life programming,
• supports both the Pascal standard and the Extended Pascal standard as defined by ISO, ANSI and IEEE. (ISO 7185:1990, ISO/IEC 10206:1991, ANSI/IEEE 770X3.160-1989)
• supports other Pascal standards (UCSD Pascal, Borland Pascal, Pascal-SC) in so far as this serves the goal of clarity and usability,
• may be distributed under normal GNU license conditions
• can generate code and run on any computer for which the GNU C compiler can generate code and run.

Pascal was originally designed for teaching. GNU Pascal provides a smooth way to proceed to challenging programming tasks without learning a completely different language.

GNU Pascal compiler is part of the GNU Compiler family combining a language independent part of the GNU Compiler with a Pascal specific front end.

Other compilers of the family currently include compilers for the C, C++ and Objective C languages.