Sorry I asked a question before introducing myself, I try to stay out of the habit, but it was driving me nuts...
Anyways... Hello, I'm Stephen Hurd. I live in Springside, Saskatchewan, Canada and I am a professional perl programmer. Recently, in my spare time I've been porting some of the old BBS software over to *NIX as almost all of it seems to be written in pascal (which I hadn't touched for about 3-4 years until about three weeks ago). Because I run FreeBSD, I started using GNU pascal... I was impressed. I fiddled with it for about 2 weeks, and actually got a version of TradeWars up and running. So then I moved on to LORD IGMs (In Game Modules)... as LORD is in the process of being ported to Linux, I felt that there should be a few IGMs available for it too. So I pulled the source for one of the IGMs and did my usual "try and at least make it build" in GNU pascal. After about three days of wrestling with the thing, I turned to some of the guys on the official LORD support IRC channel. The one guy there (zoob) mentioned that he used Free Pascal and found it pretty easy to port software over. So I went to the site and grabbed a copy, and ended up with only about 50 errors I had to fix to get it to build (note I didn't say work) Much better. Throw in the fact that I didn't have to keep my variable type translation table handy, and you've got a pretty nice and easy port. It would be nice if the FreeBSD port was further along, but you can't ask for everything.
As an interesting note, the Linux version runs great under FreeBSD with the linux compatability layer... generating nice linux programs.
So keep up the good work, I should ask stupid questions like the last one more than twice a month.