Good IDE for Mac OS 9? - Macintosh Garden

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2010, March 25 - 6:14pm

Bolkonskij

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Joined: 2009 Aug 3

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Good IDE for Mac OS 9?

Hi folks,

recently I've been picking up programming again. It has probably been a decade since I last tinkered around with Pascal, but the other day, just for fun, I downloaded the Lazarus IDE for Windows on a computer at work. Lazarus is just an excellent piece of software if you intend to write something in Pascal. Just installed and fired it up - worked like a charm and I had a great time writing simple IF THEN and CASE apps while trying to remember how it all worked.

Of course I'd love to do all this on my good old Mac companion (iMac G4, 800 Mhz, 768 MB RAM, OS 9.2.2) since I'm seriously thinking about writing some small OS 9 utilities later on, but I'm a bit spoiled now by Lazarus. Just downloaded THINK Pascal 4.5 including the update and folks I have to admit, it feels soooo 80s like. So outdated and complicated. While I love Retro in gaming, it can be really annoying for programming.

Anyone knows a good integrated developement enviroment for writing pascal stuff on OS 9?

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2010, March 26 - 2:55am

amatecha

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Joined: 2010 Mar 10

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I thought Codewarrior was the top IDE for Mac OS? i don't know. For C/C++ anyway, I guess.

2010, April 5 - 7:10am

Bolkonskij

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Joined: 2009 Aug 3

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Right, just for C/C++ unfortunately. However, someone over at another Mac forums was so kind to share a PASCAL Patch for Codewarrior 7.1 with me. That would enable using Codewarrior 7 for coding in PASCAL. I'll give it a try this afternoon - if it works I'll upload it later on.

2010, April 8 - 5:50am

MikeTomTom

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Joined: 2009 Dec 7

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You could look at the freepascal.org efforts; Free Pascal version 2 for Mac OS (X and 7 - 9):
http://www.freepascal.org/fpcmac.var
Macinstosh Programmers Workshop (MPW) is also required by Free Pascal, this can be downloaded for free from Apple. http://developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-tools/

2012, March 2 - 3:21am

turtlecroc

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Joined: 2009 Oct 18

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Those replies pretty much drive home what Bolkonskij was saying. Think Pascal (and C) have a complicated mess of an environment--possibly even worse then Codewarrior's. I have never seen anything as simple or straightforward as Lazarus or Turbo Pascal for the Mac. I mean seriously, having to deal with MPW to use Free Pascal..? OMG. That may be the worst of all. Those compilers all work well, but..... I know exactly where Bolkonskij is coming from.

2012, March 5 - 7:14am

Northcott

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Joined: 2009 Aug 15

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Think Pascal (and C) have a complicated mess of an environment--possibly even worse then Codewarrior's... I mean seriously, having to deal with MPW to use Free Pascal..? OMG. That may be the worst of all.

I can certainly agree as far as CodeWarrior, it's horribly complicated to get even the smallest project set up.

But to play devil's advocate: Think Pascal is still considered the gold standard by what's left of the Mac Pascal community (search for Ingemar's page to see what I mean). Free Pascal is a good compiler, and MPW, if given a serious (and very long) trial run, can be absolutely amazing to use. MPW is certainly the most "Mac-like" IDE, mixing the longstanding developer favorite Unix shell tools and environment with the Macintosh graphical interfaces and multiple document presentation into one innovative tool. Although off-topic, since MPW is a near POSIX environment, you can even get a slightly older copy of the Portable Object Compiler and write classic Mac programs in Objective-C (take that, Apple:).

I agree though overall. None of the options are great. Personally, if I had way more time on my hands, as a Linux software dev, I'd learn MPW and Free Pascal (not to be confused with Apple's MPW Pascal, which is bad...). CodeWarrior is more suited to traditional Macintosh development, but became very complicated as versions progressed (try applying that patch mentioned above yourself and you'll see). Think Pascal is a golden oldie and thus feels retro and is 68k only. Technically, Borland did release Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh, but I'm fairly sure it would only run on a 64k ROM mac (like 128k, 512k, etc.) and may or may not be equivalent to its DOS counterpart. And even if you did settle on a tradeoff, you would have to program in straight ToolBox calls (not too bad, but a lot of IM research) since the later greater versions of MacApp were C++ only, same with MetroWerk's PowerPlant and Symantec's.

For having Pascal as the flagship language for so many years, the Mac has a very limited set of options for it.