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Prospero Extended Pascal 32-bit Edition for Windows 95/98/NT and later Product description

Extended Pascal is a language designed to meet the needs of a wide variety of users from beginners to serious developers. It is based on and includes the traditional "classic" Pascal language, greatly increasing its range without compromising its essential qualities of security and maintainability. There are enhancements which make the language simple to use, such as relaxed order of declarations and constant expressions, and major new features including: Secure modular program construction Dynamic strings and string operations Direct-access files and file binding Run-time selection of types Array and record constructors Structured function results Initial values of variables and fields Complex arithmetic and functions Date and time facilities Extended Pascal is defined in US & International standards, and the standards committees have also defined in a Technical Report a set of Object Oriented extensions which are not part of the formal standards. The emphasis throughout is on providing orderly and coherent answers to practical problems, in line with the original aims of Pascal. The modular programming facilities are suitable both for project development and for libraries; types, constants, variables, procedures and functions can be exported from modules, and then be imported by other modules or main programs. There are options for selective import, renaming to eliminate clashes, and protection of exported variables. Dynamic type selection allows array or string sizes, for instance, to be defined at run time. An initial value may be specified as part of a variable or field declaration, or may be associated with a type and automatically given to variables or fields of that type. Prospero Extended Pascal provides the complete Extended Pascal language, including the Object Oriented additions, together with object-style exception handling using "try" statements. Pascal programs have access to an extensive library of additional routines, and can make direct calls on API functions. Standard conformance can optionally be checked.

The software includes: 32-bit Extended Pascal compiler and linker Programmer's workbench (IDE) Symbolic debugger Library manager Pascal run-time libraries "Make" and conversion utilities 400+ page machine-readable user documentation The programmer's workbench is tailored to the requirements of program development, and provides a working environment which makes it quick and easy to compile, link and debug. The workbench gives integrated access to the "make" program Promake and the symbolic debugger Probe; it also provides for searching indexes of cross-module references and API definitions. With Probe, the source-level symbolic debugger, the programmer can work through an executing program at the source line level, displaying or altering variables, setting breakpoints or watching for conditions to arise, and displaying the recent execution and call histories. The Promake utility can be invoked either from the workbench, or from a command line or batch command. It is directed by a control file, which can employ macros and implicit commands. The library manager ProLib can produce either a library for selective static linking, or a dynamic-link library with associated LIB file (which may also contain other modules). There is a general-purpose textfile preprocessor, and programs to convert the C-language headers output by resource editors, and to assist in the translation of existing source code.

References: Introduction to Extended Pascal, Pascal Standards.

Downloadable document: Extended Pascal and Objects.

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