New Alpha_(re)

Wed, 2 Apr 1997 10:11:13 +0000 (GMT)

On Wed, 2 Apr 1997 00:08:59 +0200 (MET DST) Peter Gerwinski 
 wrote:
[...]

>(left-justified).  To produce "_______123" you must explicitly say
>"writeln ( 123 : 10 );".
>
>The Standard says that these default widths are implementation-dependent.
>There was a short discussion about whether GPC's behavior (default width
>10 for Integers, 14 for Reals, 6 for Booleans) was a good decision.
>We soon agreed that it would be better to produce left-justified output
>when no width has been specified.  Otherwise, you would have to say
>"writeln ( 123 : 1 );" to get the left-justified "123" which is clumsy
>and misleading.  We forgot to post a copy of the discussion to the list;
>sorry about that.
>
>In case you have some arguments to set it back to the previous state,
>just post it here.  (These are only some constants in `rts/rts.h', so it
>was not much work to change.  Perhaps (yet another) command-line switch
>would satisfy everybody?)

I think this could be the way forward. Having a multitude 
of command line switches is very good, in that it gives
the programmer more flexibility to use the compiler in
the way that he/she likes, not in the way that somebody
else thinks they should. However, the price of flexibility
is complexity. In case you haven't done this, can you
introduce a .CFG file (like with Borland) where one can
put all the command line switches that they want to use?
The compiler will read the .CFG file before doing anything
else, and will adjust its behaviour accordingly. I personally
prefer this approach to using environment variables or the
such. You can make many sample .CFG files 
(e.g., borland.cfg, extended.cfg, iso.cfg, etc) which people
can then rename to GPC.CFG or whatever.

Sorry if all this already exists. I lurk in this list, because I 
am quite interested in GPC and its future (and its potential 
to release me from arbitrary decisions made by certain 
companies about where their compilers are going) but I am 
yet to fully utilise GPC myself.

Best regards, The Chief 
Dr Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief, and the Great Elephant)
Author of:  Chief's Installer Pro v3.12 for Win16 and Win32.
Homepage:  http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/African_Chief/
E-mail: laa12@cc.keele.ac.uk


The African Chief (laa12@cc.keele.ac.uk)