Pscal implements a substantial subset of the original Pascal language specification, along with a few extensions. Notable things it does not support are nested functions/procedure and pointers. It is also completely free of object oriented constructs by design. Sorry, not a fan of that programming paradigm.

The most notable thing about pscal is that while I've been directing the development and the doing the debugging, the large majority of the code has been written by various AI's. Anyone who has tried to work on a medium to large sized project with AI will know that at least as of the time I'm writing this that is no easy task. Limited context windows and other limitations quickly lead to unpredictable results and constant code breakage. The OpenAI models have been especially bad at this, though I haven't tried o3 or o4-mini yet.

The bulk of my recent development has been by way of Google's Gemeni 2.5 Pro. Which has for the most part been a breath of fresh air. It's not perfect, but it's better than the vast majority of human programmers even at the current scale of pscal, which is about 8K lines as I write this README.

Pscal uses cmake, but I've only just started learning that particular tool. I do my development on an M1 MacBook Pro, primarily using (shudder) Xcode.

As the code was written primarily by AI's I'm releasing this to the public domain via the 'unlicense".

Install:

You will need cmake, curl, SDL2, and SDL2_ttf.

Here's how to get them installed if needed...

For curl...

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

# RHEL / CentOS 7
sudo yum install libcurl-devel

# Fedora
sudo dnf install libcurl-devel

# SUSE / openSUSE
sudo zypper install libcurl-devel

# Alpine
sudo apk add curl-dev

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S curl

# MacOS (with Homebrew)
brew install curl

On macOS you may also need to tell your build where Homebrew’s curl lives:
export LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix curl)/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix curl)/include"

Here’s how to get CMake itself installed if needed...

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cmake

# RHEL / CentOS
sudo yum install cmake

# Fedora
sudo dnf install cmake

# SUSE / openSUSE
sudo zypper install cmake

# Alpine
sudo apk add cmake

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S cmake

# macOS (with Homebrew)
brew update
brew install cmake

For SDL2 and SDL2_ttf...

Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev

RHEL / CentOS (and similar, may require EPEL for older versions)
For CentOS 8+ / RHEL 8+ / AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux:
sudo dnf install SDL2-devel SDL2_ttf-devel

For CentOS 7 (these packages are often in EPEL repository):
sudo yum install epel-release # If EPEL is not already enabled
sudo yum install SDL2-devel SDL2_ttf-devel

Fedora
sudo dnf install SDL2-devel SDL2_ttf-devel

SUSE / openSUSE
sudo zypper install SDL2-devel SDL2_ttf-devel

Alpine
sudo apk add sdl2-dev sdl2_ttf-dev

Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S sdl2 sdl2_ttf

macOS (with Homebrew)
brew install sdl2 sdl2_ttf

After cloning the repo...

cd pscal
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Binaries will be in ../bin

You will also need to do something similar to the following to get units and the code in Examples/ and Tests/ to work...

# Run this from the root of your git repo
REPO_DIR="$(pwd)"

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/Pscal

sudo ln -s "${REPO_DIR}/etc" /usr/local/Pscal/etc
sudo ln -s "${REPO_DIR}/lib" /usr/local/Pscal/lib