The Free Pascal compiler is now able to compile and run programs like those of the contests. This is encouraging. Editing and interactive compiling work fine. Interactive debugging support is not yet implemented. Stepping, breakpoints, and so on do not work.
Work continues daily.
There is another IDE for Free Pascal, called FPEdit, which seems to have stopped development in 1997. It is little more than a text editor with an option to compile and does not do a good job of emulating the Borland look and feel. This caused the free compiler to reject some Pascal programs that Borland had accepted. However, this hasn't been a problem for C programmers, so it shouldn't be too bad to cure the Pascal programmers of it. When compiling, the Pascal compiler did not accept some programs which appeared valid.