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This is the README to utpc 0.1. This version is only in the alpha test
phase and under heavy construction. It is released under the
conditions of the GNU Public License.

What is utpc?

Utpc stands for Unix Transparent Pascal Compiler, which is one of
greatest exaggerations I ever heard of :-). With this version you only
get a library which emulates some procedures of the BGI graphic
library and the crt unit. What you don't get is a language extension
to understand Turbo Pascal. And it is unlikely there will be such a
thing unless one day Borland releases a TP for unix. What might be
added in the future is support for other units.


Why am I writing such a thing?

To make the use of graphics under X simple to use for persons (esp.
students) who are used to DOS. Yes, I know, it would be better to
teach them gl, Ygl, Xt, Xlib, Motif, xview, ... directly, but the first
thing we want to teach here is physics, not X11 programming. Like it
or not. But don't complain if Turbo programmers complain about
complicated graphics under X11 and stick to their $%&"# DOS machines.


What do you need to use this package?

Currently you need an IBM RS/6000 under AIX with the xlp pascal
compiler and X11. Hopefully this package will be ported to other
platforms one day.
You will need Fred Hucht's (fred@hal6000.thp.Uni-Duisburg.DE)
free Ygl library, at least version 2.1. 


This version is made available for two reasons:

1.) If you test it and find bugs, please tell me.

2.) Much more important: If you like the idea, please help me. I can
only use part of my time for this project and appreciate any help you
can give me. There are still a lot of things to do:

- make the thing imake configurable.
- make the graph emulation complete.
- write a preprocessor to convert Turbo Pascal to some standard.
  this will be neccesary for a lot of things:
  * assign/reset assign/rewrite versus rewrite(f, mode) or
    reset(f,mode)
  * Set the terminal to noecho and only to echo for a readln from stdin
  * else vs. otherwise
  * put a setattributes behind each direct access to TextAttributes
  * perhaps use curses for the crt emulation, actually crt uses low
    level routines because curses messes up all terminal settings and
    a writeln without modification wouldn't work with curses anyway.
  * treat other awful language extension of TP...
- port the code to other systems than AIX.
- ....

Enjoy,
	Michael (michael@hal6000.thp.Uni-Duisburg.DE)