Editing Free Pascal (section)

== Supported dialects ==
Initially, Free Pascal adopted the [[De facto standard|''de facto'' standard]] dialect of Pascal programmers, Borland Pascal, but later adopted Delphi's Object Pascal. From version 2.0 on, Delphi compatibility has been continuously implemented or improved.

The project has a ''compilation mode'' concept, and the developers made it clear that they would incorporate working patches for the standardized dialects of the [[American National Standards Institute]] (ANSI) and [[International Organization for Standardization]] (ISO) to create a standards-compliant mode.

A small effort has been made to support some of the [[Apple, Inc.|Apple]] Pascal syntax to ease interfacing to the [[Classic Mac OS]] and [[macOS]]. The Apple dialect implements some standard Pascal features that Turbo Pascal and Delphi omit.

The 2.2.''x'' release series did not significantly change the dialect objectives beyond roughly Delphi 7 level syntax, instead aiming for closer compatibility. A notable exception to this was the addition of support for [https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refch8.html#x102-1240008 generics] to Free Pascal in version 2.2.0, several years before they were supported in any capacity by Delphi.

In 2011 several Delphi 2006-specific features were added in the development branch, and some of the starting work for the features new in Delphi 2009 (most notably the addition of the <code>UnicodeString</code> type) was completed. The development branch also has an ''Objective-Pascal'' extension for [[Objective-C]] ([[Cocoa (API)|Cocoa]]) interfacing.

As of version 2.7.1, Free Pascal implemented basic ISO Pascal mode, though many things such as the <code>Get</code> and <code>Put</code> procedures, and the file-buffer variable concept for file handling were still absent.

As of version 3.0.0, ISO Pascal mode is fairly complete. It has been able to compile [https://standardpascal.org/ standardpascal.org]'s P5 ISO Pascal compiler with no changes.