I thought Codewarrior was the top IDE for Mac OS? i don't know. For C/C++ anyway, I guess.

You could look at the freepascal.org efforts; Free Pascal version 2 for Mac OS (X and 7 - 9):
http://www.freepascal.org/fpcmac.var
Macinstosh Programmers Workshop (MPW) is also required by Free Pascal, this can be downloaded for free from Apple. http://developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-tools/

Those replies pretty much drive home what Bolkonskij was saying. Think Pascal (and C) have a complicated mess of an environment--possibly even worse then Codewarrior's. I have never seen anything as simple or straightforward as Lazarus or Turbo Pascal for the Mac. I mean seriously, having to deal with MPW to use Free Pascal..? OMG. That may be the worst of all. Those compilers all work well, but..... I know exactly where Bolkonskij is coming from.

Think Pascal (and C) have a complicated mess of an environment--possibly even worse then Codewarrior's... I mean seriously, having to deal with MPW to use Free Pascal..? OMG. That may be the worst of all.

I can certainly agree as far as CodeWarrior, it's horribly complicated to get even the smallest project set up.

But to play devil's advocate: Think Pascal is still considered the gold standard by what's left of the Mac Pascal community (search for Ingemar's page to see what I mean). Free Pascal is a good compiler, and MPW, if given a serious (and very long) trial run, can be absolutely amazing to use. MPW is certainly the most "Mac-like" IDE, mixing the longstanding developer favorite Unix shell tools and environment with the Macintosh graphical interfaces and multiple document presentation into one innovative tool. Although off-topic, since MPW is a near POSIX environment, you can even get a slightly older copy of the Portable Object Compiler and write classic Mac programs in Objective-C (take that, Apple:).

I agree though overall. None of the options are great. Personally, if I had way more time on my hands, as a Linux software dev, I'd learn MPW and Free Pascal (not to be confused with Apple's MPW Pascal, which is bad...). CodeWarrior is more suited to traditional Macintosh development, but became very complicated as versions progressed (try applying that patch mentioned above yourself and you'll see). Think Pascal is a golden oldie and thus feels retro and is 68k only. Technically, Borland did release Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh, but I'm fairly sure it would only run on a 64k ROM mac (like 128k, 512k, etc.) and may or may not be equivalent to its DOS counterpart. And even if you did settle on a tradeoff, you would have to program in straight ToolBox calls (not too bad, but a lot of IM research) since the later greater versions of MacApp were C++ only, same with MetroWerk's PowerPlant and Symantec's.

For having Pascal as the flagship language for so many years, the Mac has a very limited set of options for it.

This is why I never wrote a single program for the Mac. (unless you include junk in Chipmunk Basic and Applescript.) Conversely, I wrote lots of professional stuff in Windows in various versions of Turbo Pascal, and got paid for it. Borland Turbo Pascal was simple and powerful--everything you could really want in a development environment. I still use it occasionally. How sad that I can only use a decent Pascal on Mac in Virtual PC! I did try Turbo Pascal 1.1 for Mac, but it crashes OS9, so as you say, only for earlier hardware/software apparently. It does appear to support units so must be roughly equivalent to TP4 for MS Windows.

I would like to try Free Pascal, but there was some sort of "copyright dispute" _laugh_ so freepascal.org removed it from their lousy website.

Does anyone know where I can get ver. 2.0.x for OS9? Anyone have a copy..? Thanks.

I uploaded my copy here some time ago. It's not the absolute last version I don't think, but it is 2.0.x IIRC. I didn't realize there was a copyright dispute. What happened with that?

Supposedly some Delphi code found its way in, and somebody noticed. and cared.

Anyway, i searched Mac garden and no Free Pascal that i can find.....

Do you still have that copy you uploaded?

When I searched for "Free Pascal" (two words) it was the fourth item down. The link is

http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/free-pascal-202

The download link on that page actually works for a change:)

What th f---? I swear that result did not show up when I searched yesterday. Did you just re-up it? Anyway, I will test it in the not-too-distant future and try to post some comments. Thanks.

Playing devels advocate:

I have never found a more freindly and easy to use envirement than TML Pascal/Complete Pascal in a compiler plus IDE on any system. That said there is no question that Think Pascal is second in line, it is easy to use for any project and far surpasses Turbo Pascal, MPW, GNU tools, Lazerus, or any of the well known DOS, Windows, Linux, Darwin (including Darwin OS X), Amiga, TOS, or RISC OS based IDEs in simplicity and usability.

It is a shame that Turbo Pascal was never updated to target the PowerPC CPU. It is even more of a shame that TML Pascal was lost to time very early on.

Now Code Warrior, while it does target the PowerPC (even with its Pascal) is one of the worst enviroments as far as complexity is conserned (though absolutely needed to do anything on the PowerPC.

MPW is usable. It has a noticable learning curve no matter what enviroment you come from so be prepared to spend some time learning if you decide to use any MPW based tools (including FreePascal). Do not get me wrong MPW is one of those things that once you do learn to use, it will grow on you and you will learn to love it.

I think that it would be good to go back and look at some of the early Enviroments on the Macintosh and learn from there simple interface. Things like LightSpeed C, TML Pascal, ZBasic, QuickBasic, Consulair Mac C system, MDS and others from this time. These tools realy made the task of coding easy, yes you realy need ResEdit to complete the package, though these did a good job before ResEdit was around and presented a good interface and reasonable means of dealing with a compiler, assembler, linker, and debugger. The simplicity of these tools is what is realy needed in a package if we want to get new developers on ANY platform, and especialy on the Classic Mac OS.

OT:
This reminds me of a project that is out there that I stumbled acrossed some time ago and can no longer find.

The Project is an attempt at cloning the Classic Mac OS, I would be very intererested in finding this again if any knows where to look. Thank you in advanced.

Are you thinking of this?

A while back, there were discussions on creating a Classic Mac OS-compatible, modern, open-source OS called Nueve (later renamed MEAD as the focus changing to compatibility instead of an OS). Unfortunately, MEAD (to my knowledge) ended up little more than a few proposals, but it intrigued all of us for a time.

codewarrior 8?