Pascaline

Pascaline is an Eclipse plug-in aimed at programming in the Pascal language. Don't expect lots of features as in a profesional IDE, because it is focused mainly in education. Pascaline has been used to teach programming during the last three years to more than 1,000 students.

Pascaline is based on Eclipse and CDT. As an Eclipse plug-in it is integrated quite well within this profesional IDE. As a CDT extension, it provides several powerful features, such as debugging Pascal programs.

Pascaline uses the FreePascal compiler, which provides support for different Pascal flavours. However, only two of them are currently supported by Pascaline: Object Pascal and FreePascal. This is due to the fact that the main development is focused on programming learning. Does it mean that other flavours (like Delphi) would never be supported? Well, we hope they will ever be supported, but nowadays, the Pascaline development team is too small to focus on other flavours. In other words: would you like to collaborate? Post a message in the developers list.

The Pascaline project is hosted at SourceForge.net

News

Pascaline 1.0 has been released.
Among other features, this new version now compiles all files in a project, marking all errors it finds in each file, and the user interface has been revised and improved. See the Installation section below for instructions on installing Pascaline.

Documentation

The code is the main and most accurate documentation available. You can download it, or browse it online.

You may also want to take a look at the development page.

Installation

The easiest way of starting to use Pascaline is to download EclipseGavab. Usually, once a new version of Pascaline is released, a new version of EclipseGavab including it is developed.
On the other edge, you can also compile it from source.
However, if you look for something in the middle, that is, you have your own Eclipse installation with the set of tools you need that suits your needs, you can install Pascaline from the update site.
Note that, in the later two cases (if you use Pascaline out of EclipseGavab) you will need to install CDT (C/C++ Development Tools). This is automatically suggested by Galileo, but must be manually added in prior versions. Pascaline versions prior to 1.0, need CDT 5.0.2. This is a nightly-build release because there are some important bugs in versions 5.0.0 and 5.0.1. Pascaline 1.0 needs CDT 6.0 (which is available through the Galileo repository).

Pascaline is based on the FreePascal compiler. Installation of external tools required by Pascaline depends on the operating system:

Linux
For Linux distributions the following packages must be installed (usually available from the package manager provided by your linux distribution):

• build-essential (needed by CDT)
• fp-compiler, fp-units-base, fp-units-rtl (needed by Pascaline)

Windows
Under Windows, you also need FreePascal and MinGW installed in the same directory as eclipse. You should end up with this directory structure:

parent_dir
   eclipse
   mingw
   msys
   fpc

MinGW must include the GNU Source Level Debugger. It can be found here. Just install it in the mingw directory.

Nota that due to several issues related to gdb and Windows processes that are not under our control, the program being debugged (the debuggee) is executed in an external Windows terminal.

Development

The development page of the project contains useful information about things learnt during the development of Pascaline. It also points out things that remain pending and future developments. If you plan to contribute to this project, or modify it in any way, it is a must-see.