A few days ago i asked one of the members of the BePascal project, in this case Eric Jourde (Baldur for those who frequent BeShare) to give me an idea of the project status and future goals. He agreed and later sent me a few paragraphs which i will now paste:

"BePascal members are Olivier Coursière (aka oco) & Eric Jourde (aka baldur). The Team of FreePascal have developed a modern Pascal compiler (fpc), which is also available on a big number of operating systems. But fpc couldn't directly use the objects in BeOS' C++. It was for this reason that we created the BePascal project, to enable fpc to create some GUI under BeOS. We tried developing the same API in Pascal like the API C++ structure, to have the same BeBook reference. Our aim is to provide a Pascal development environment including:

- the call of the BeOS API.
- and in the future a RAD, like 'Delphi'

Progress of project:

The basic objects of API were encapsulated "by hand" to show the feasibility of the project (BMessage, BApplication, BForm, BHandler, BLooper...). To help diminish the quantity of work required to manually convert all the objects of the C++ API (several hours per object), we developed tools which take care of a big part of our work. Currently, these tools are far from being perfect (the sources obtained must be worked over again by hand), but make it possible to save an invaluable time. The time of translation is now less than two hours per object.

These last months, we especially worked on the tools to assist us in the conversion of headings (* h). Now that these tools start to become effective, we tackle the most awaited part our project: the encapsulation of the graphic interface. The encapsulation of BView and BButton is practically complete

(screenshot)."

These guys are making huge strides in their progress as you can see. The more wider choice of coding languages available for BeOS, the more wider base of coders can be atracted to BeOS. If you'd like to help them in their effort, you can reach them through the project homepage, linked above.