Mac Pascal

Mac Pascal is a designation that was retrospectively assigned to Apple's Object Pascal.

Based on earlier foundations laid with Lisa Pascal and Clascal a development team at Apple Computer led by Larry Tesler developed an object-oriented version of the Pascal language in consultation with Niklaus Wirth. The first version of this dialect, termed Object Pascal, was released in 1985.

Within short time Object Pascal became the premier development language for Mac OS Classic. Apple's Object Pascal syntax was also adopted by alternative IDEs for the Macintosh platform including THINK Pascal and Metrowerks Pascal. In 1989 concepts of Object Pascal were included in version 5.5 of Turbo Pascal.

Since then, Object Pascal is a generic term for modern Pascal implementations allowing for OOP, and Apple's original implementation has been termed Mac Pascal.

Mac Pascal support in Free Pascal

Today, the Mac Pascal syntax is still supported by Free Pascal if the MACPAS mode is activated. This may be e.g. required if one wants to develop FPC programs for Target MacOS and incorporate legacy code.

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From the Free Pascal wiki, page "Mac Pascal", as it stood on 2021-02-11 after a change by Trev, out of the wiki's dump of 2024-05-26. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.