Pascal-FC is an implementation of Pascal with extra constructs for teaching concurrent programming, created by Alan Burns and Geoff Davies and used as the language for their Concurrent Programming book.

This is an unofficial and experimental fork of the Pascal-FC compiler and interpreter. It is not the original Pascal-FC, but is derived from it. It is also not guaranteed to be stable; if you're looking for a stable Pascal-FC that compiles using Free Pascal, try upstream.

By 'unofficial', I mean that my changes are not officially sanctioned by the original authors. By 'experimental', I mean this fork can and will blow up, set fire to things, and generally give you a hard time when you least expect it. There are, at the time of writing, definitely bugs.

Where possible, I intend to keep this fork up-to-date with upstream.

So far, most of the changes have occurred in pint, the interpreter. This is the focus of hacking right now, but I do intend to spend some quality time with pfccomp, the compiler, later on.

• Changes to make Pascal-FC build in native OBJFPC (Object Free-Pascal) mode, rather than ISO-compatibility;
• Some refactoring to decouple the code, split it across units, and make it a bit easier to read and understand, compared to the single-source version from upstream.
• Rejigged line handling that greatly expands the input line limit.
• Unit tests (in progress)

• More refactoring and unit testing, eventually moving towards a more object-oriented implementation.
• Replacing the listings file with direct error reporting to standard error.
• Removing more of the limits of the compiler and interpreter.
• Possibly adding atomic-action concurrency primitives, a la C11.
• Fixing some of the bugs that crop up in using Pascal-FC in practice.

You will need the Free Pascal Compiler (version 3.2.0 or newer) and either some form of make or the Lazarus IDE.

Use the following Lazarus projects to build Pascal-FC:

• pfccomp.lpi: compiler
• pint.lpi: interpreter
• pfctests.lpi: GUI unit test runner

NOTE: I don't often build from Makefile, so these may lag behind the Lazarus projects in terms of dependency tracking.

To build the compiler, use make pfccomp; to build the interpreter, use make pint; to build both, use make or make all. Unit tests are currently not buildable from Makefile.

Optionally, you can use sudo make install to install Pascal-FC to /usr/bin.

You can now build and run a program with ./pfc myprogram.pas (or pfc if you installed it).

For fun, mostly, but also in recognition of Pascal-FC still being, in 2020, a key part of the York CS degree's concurrent programming teaching :)

Pascal-FC is released under the GNU GPL, version 2 (or later). See LICENSE.

This fork of Pascal-FC has been worked on, in various ways, by the following people:

• Alan Burns (c.1990, original)
• Geoff Davies (c.1990, original)
• Lex Bailey (2018--2020, upstream)
• Fergus Molloy (2018--2020, upstream)
• Matt Windsor (2018--2022, this fork)