Standard Compatibility [was: Re: New Alpha]

Thu, 03 Apr 1997 18:52:18 +0200

Phil Nelson wrote:
> 
> >So, obviously, gpc needs to support both ways.
> Yes, I agree.  When the --borland_pascal switch is set, it should look
> like Borland Pascal!

Hi Phil and the Rest of the world ...

Although gpc ain't a commercial product it should be build on wide 
acceptance.
(Where else shall all the really good gpc-programs come from?)
In past nobody was interested in any pascal-standards but Borland.
Borland-Pascal IMHO is the standard-pascal anyway.
The probably are hundreds of Borland-Pascal-Users on one or two
other-semi-standard-pascal-with-some-extensions-users.

Until raising version 2.0 (the star) gpc wasn't alive. It really seemed
to be a rather dead language. For now it will not live from the euphorie
of the 'main' developers but more from many contributions from many
programmers all over the world.

Sure, the only one concurrent platform is gnu C, but gnu C lives from
that contributions too. Why is linux that much popular.

gpc really shall default to borland/turbo-pascal behaviour. You could
implement reading ~/.gpcrc to change that. (For ease this could be done
with a shell script) The cause ain't 'standard' performance, as
thousands
of dos-pascal-programs will be ported to linux. However, this may be a
little bit visionary. But we should NOT artificially complicate changes 
to gnu pascal. (Vice versa case is an interesting question to discuss
too.)

> >However, I really don't want to use hand-made strings in my programs,
> >I really could stand a little more comfort... :-)
> Yup!  And others (including me) agree.  Hense Extended Pascal!  :)

I agree too, but why should
{-------------snip-------------}
i:=7;
writeln("i=",i);
{-------------snip-------------}
give somthing like

"i=             7 ?"

(Please don't ask (me) why not.)

nb. The Borland Pascal behaviour conforms to ISO 10206 too. How about
implementing sysvars IntegerTotalWidth and the like with values
defaulting to the Turbo Pascal settings (i.e. 0, with special behaviour:
no cutting of strings.), then you will have a powerful facility to print
tables from scratch. Formatted as you wan't from clear, readable and
confusenessless code like 
write('i=',i:whatever^.thisconfusingwidthofintegers.be);

> --
> Phil Nelson                       NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
> e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu           LPF: http://www.lpf.org
> http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil       !gifs: http://www.lpf.org/Patent/Gif/Gif.html

regards,


sven
 
==================================================================
Sven Engelhardt
http://www.sax.net/                               mailto:se@sik.de

Sven Engelhardt (sven@sik.de)