Programmers wanted: CRT, Graph, etc. for GNU Pascal_(re)

Wed, 24 Jul 1996 11:29:57 -0400 (EDT)

	Hmm ... I'm started to get interested now.  I *may* be interested 
in doing stuff for Linux (may is the operative word here 'tho, folks ... 
since being a student tends to eat up a lot of my time ...).  Has the 
"Borland UNITs" problem been fixed with GPC yet?  Or are we still stick 
with that rather nasty (IMHO of course) hack we had to do by  #including 
the the UNIT file in any program we wished to use that unit?


On Tue, 23 Jul 1996, Peter Gerwinski wrote:
> would be *highly interesting* for those programmers who are accustomed
> to Borland Pascal and think about changing to GNU Pascal (instead of
> changing to Delphi or C++) in the future.  To have those Units on the DOS 
> platform only would be a starting point -- portable versions would 
> be preferred, of course.


	The last time I checked out your BO5 library, Peter, any program 
that used your Crt unit, I think, had to be set uid on the Linux platform 
'cause it did direct screen writes.  Is this still true?  Or did you 
change it to use NCurses yet?

	Personally I recommonend making it SLang-based rather than 
NCurses-based.  Mainly because the SLang screen management routines are 
faster than NCurses.  Also, SLang is also a highly portable library in in 
itself (with versions for DOS, OS/2, and other unices in addition to 
Linux).  I don't recall ever seeing a DOS NCurses (Curses perhaps, but 
not NCurses).  

	I've already written a Crt-like MODULE for Gardens Point Modula-2 
compiler which are SLang-based.  Shouldn't be too hard to convert over to 
GPC.  That is ... if anybody is interested ...


> > A portable Printer library?? 
> What's the problem?  It would just be a Unit (Module) which "knows" the
> file name of the printer device for the actual operating system and opens
> a text file "lst", so the application program doesn't need to care about
> how the printer is named on the operating system.


	Yeah .. it shouldn't be too hard to implement Printer ... it 
seems rather straight forward to me.  


> Borland's Units *are* an existing standard.  There may be other standards, 
> but I think these Units are very popular.  Furthermore, we *have* the source
> for them, so I ask again:


	However, like the other guy said, certain things in Borland 
Pascal only make sense under DOS (like the Mem[] variable and ABSOLUTE 
variables).  Of course we could just do what other Borland-Pascal like 
compilers for other platforms (like Virtual Pascal and Speed Pascal/2 for 
OS/2) do, and just ignore them.


===============================================================================
Arcadio Alivio Sincero, Jr.
Sophomore, Computer Science Major at the University of Maryland at College Park
Amateur competitive bodybuilder
Email: lotu@wam.umd.edu, WWW: 

"D.A.R.E. .... to keep cops off donuts."

Arcadio Alivio Sincero (lotu@wam.umd.edu)