The very beginning

I'm starting an Eclipse Plugin for Free Pascal. My intention is to provide a plugin suitable for use in the context of some subjects that we teach at university. Up to now, we have a Free Pascal plugin that has been built from scratch. This plugin is very basic, and lacks some features that nowadays are considered essential, like an outline, a model builder, and debug integration, among others. The plugin is available here, and it has been developed by Micael Gallego and I, along with another plugin for PascalFC, a dialect of Pascal aimed at teaching concurrent programming.

Before starting the development of the plugin, I have taken a look at the technologies suitable for this task. In the context of language support within Eclipse, these technologies are CDT and DLTK. The former is designed like a tool chain that can be extended and particularized for different languages. The later is a general framework specifically tailored for dynamic languages (although other languages could suit well, as it is said in the web page). As long as i know, DLTK is mainly focused on easing the creation of a new language, by means of providing predefined wizards, an abstract editor, an outline...

However, as we need debug support, and Free Pascal compiler is able to produce debug code for gdb (available within the CDT tool chain with very good support), we'll choose the first option.

Before starting to have our hands wet, lets take a look to some documentation about the topic. The official web page of the CDT project is our first source of information. However, there are also other sources of information quite interesting. The Photran project is such one. It contains documentation about the approach taken in accomplishing a similar task for the Fortran language. In fact, it is quite similar, because there are several flavors of Fortran, and so are in Pascal (Delphi, Free Pascal, ObjectPascal.)

I'll use English as the language for this blog. However, my English is far to be perfect, so I hope readers will forgive me. Of course, suggestions and corrections about my English would be highly appreciated.

Hope it will be helpful.