Introducing a new Pascal IDE

PascalDE Logo

It’s been a long time since my last blog post, sorry about that. As you can imagine, university work has been a lot more intense in the last year of the course. There is one thing I can now show you - my third year project.

It’s a code editor/Integrated Development Environment (like Visual Studio or Notepad++) targeted at the Pascal language. I’ve named it ‘PascalDE’ (pas-cal-dee) meaning Pascal Development Environment but styled so that the ‘L’ looks like the ‘I’ in IDE. The name might not stick but I like it at the moment.

PascalDE1

Written in C# WPF, the code editor will feature syntax highlighting, autocomplete, error checking and compiler integration. You can see I’ve started to implement syntax highlighting and error checking in the screenshots. I wanted to target Pascal because my A-Level projects were all written in Pascal and it seems full-circle to come back to it 3 years later with a new view on computer science. The IDE we used back then was Virtual Pascal, which had a DOS-like text-based UI, and no mouse support at school for some reason. I would have liked to use something like PascalDE at the time, but it was fun.

PascalDE2

There’s also a neat button that appears when you hover over the window controls. It lets you keep the program on top of other windows. I always found it annoying to have to move back and forth between windows or use aero snap when copying or viewing code.

PascalDE3

I’ve based the user interface on modern, mobile-device-style UIs. I wanted to keep it clean and easy to use; let the user focus on their work. It’s early stages but looking pretty good so far. That’s all for now.