[Rochus]

> I never thought of Pascal as a systems programming language

I referred to Oberon when stating that it isn't a system programming language, not Pascal; the latter is well suited for low-level system programming because you can take addresses and directly manipulate pointers, and there are facilities for multi-threading etc.

> what's the problem with redundancy?

FreePascal is at least three different languages in one; if you add compiler options the number of actual language versions even multiplies. There are e.g. different object systems which are even available at the same time in certain modes. This multiplies not only the learning effort, but also the development and documentation effort. It is apparent that FreePascal tries to follow C++ when looking at the feature set; C++ is a very complex language and so became FreePascal; the fact that not every feature could be freely designed but had to respect the existing feature set with all its interactions made FreePascal even more complex than C++ in some respects. And FreePascal has to carry on burdens from the past which were improved in Modula or Oberon, but which have to remain in the language for backward compatibility reasons.