- Gpc - gnu.de

New (20060325) snapshot
by Waldek Hebisch 25 Mar '06

25 Mar '06

Extra info about 4.0 port: Expect some test failures. Known problems are: - sometimes gpc thinks that variables are used when in fact they are not. This causes spurious warnings about using uninitialized variables and missings warnings about unised variables - some invalid constructs are accepted - line number info is even less acurate then it was -- Waldek Hebisch hebisch(a)math.uni.wroc.pl

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Cross-compiler for mipsle platform
by Prof A Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) 25 Mar '06

25 Mar '06

Hi A quick report. I have been able to produce a Linux-based GPC cross- compiler (gcc-2.95.4 back end) targetting the "mipsle" platform. This is the platform for the Texas Instruments AR7-based ADSL modem routers (there are a whole load of them - e.g., Linksys WAG54GV2, Safecom SWAMR-54108/SWART-54125, Netgear DG834G, Aztech DSL 600EW, Netcomm NB5, Actiontec GT701-WG, D-Link DSL-G604T, and more). The routers' firmwares are based on Montavista Linux and uClibc - this is the output of "uname -a": "Linux 2.4.17_mvl21-malta-mips_fp_le #24 Wed Feb 8 15:58:57 CST 2006 mips unknown". There have been gcc cross-compilers for some time (based on gcc- 2.95.x), which I have been using to produce some mods. I didn't believe that producing a Pascal cross-compiler would be a trivial exercise, but it was in the end not as hard as I had imagined. It was a bit of a kludgy process, and I had to build the RTS separately (in the same way in which I would build any program or library for the platform), and patch the gpc compiler driver to search for libraries in some other places, but I got there in the end. My preliminary tests indicate that the compiler is working well, and is producing good binaries that run well on the router. I also produced a shared version of libgpc.a, so that the binaries will be as small as possible (space is limited in the flash and ram disks, although "memavail" tells me that I have 99mb memory to play with (I seriously doubt it!)). So, another GPC success story :-) Best regards, The Chief -------- Prof. Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) web: http://www.greatchief.plus.com/

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[OFF] European Community Patent Consultation
by Adriaan van Os 24 Mar '06

24 Mar '06

From <http://consultation.ffii.org/> "In January 2006, the European Commission started a consultation on a project that, if it goes according to current plans, will result in the legalization of software patents, which are known to be devastating to the software industry. The project is the Community Patent. While the essential idea, having EU-wide patents, is a good one, the current Commission proposal would transfer EU and member state legislative and judicial power to the European Patent Office, which would effectively legalize their hitherto illegal practice of granting software patents. The Commission asks any interested party to fill-in a questionnaire with their views. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) questions the validity of the procedure, based on the serious lack of accessibility, which means that a majority of EU businesses are completely excluded from answering. However, we also recommend participation to those businesses that are able to do so, since this will demonstrate to what extent businesses are affected." Those on the list that live in Europe (excluding Switzerland), please participate <http://consultation.ffii.org/How_to_Answer>. Regards, Adriaan van Os

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gpc and OpenMP
by Alexander Todorov 24 Mar '06

24 Mar '06

Hello to all, are there any parallel code developers in the list? I will have to work on a mixed mode parallel project using MPI and OpenMP. There are some bindings in pascal for the MPI library which is ok. Does gpc support OpenMP compiler directives? Is there a known pascal compiler that supports OpenMP? here are some links : Message Passing Interface http://www.open-mpi.org/ http://www.lam-mpi.org/ http://www.mpi-forum.org/ http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/ OpenMP : http://www.openmp.org TIA.

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Fwd: Re: RTS and thread safety
by Frank Heckenbach 22 Mar '06

22 Mar '06

Forwarded from: marcov(a)stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) (Sorry, it's a bit late. I had overlooked it.) On 2006-02-25, Frank Heckenbach <ih8mj(a)fjf.gnu.de> wrote: > However, as I've said > before, I'm skeptical about Input etc. Do we really want a > per-thread Input, each with its own buffer (which means, if several > of them are acutally used, it becomes hard to foretell in which one > each sequence of input bytes ends up)? Similar for Output. For > StdErr, one could argue that it shouldn't buffer at all (which GPC's > in fact doesn't, and so does stderr in C by default AFAIK). This is a possible problem, buffering also complicates initialisation of a new thread, because it requires more than a shallow copy of the threadvar segment. (buffer is duplicated, stuff in output is thus twice in buffer, not to speak about what if you use pointers in the filedescriptor record etc). There are bugreports about problems with threadsafe input/output in FPC bugrepository, mostly in combination with unit crt. >> There's a few more in TP-compatibility units (like doserror in the >> Dos unit and some crt things) > > Well, for CRT, just making the internal state per-thread wouldn't > really help much AFAICS. E.g., if each threads has its own screen > buffer, and updates the real screen from it, this would probably > result in chaos. IOW, as there's only one physical screen (unless > multi-headed), I think one probably needs some common data across > threads. Or you leave it up to the user -- as, e.g., ncurses > recommends doing all curses I/O within one thread. The latter thing is a typical thing for UIs. E.g. Delphi also specifies the VCL (GUI classes) as non-threadsafe. It provides a synchronization mechanism though to schedule basic code in the mainthread. >> Since our RTL is under a slightly modified LGPL (allows static >> linking as long as you make the modifications to the FPC-RTL-licensed >> code available), license-wise I don't think there is any problem for >> you to reuse things. If there is, we could dual-license it under the >> regular LGPL as well I suppose (the main reason for the static >> linking exception is that some OS'es, like Dos, simply do not support >> dynamic linking, and support for creating dynamic libraries was not >> available for all OS'es in our compiler from the start either). > > BTW, standard LGPL allows static linking as well. You just have to > distribute object files of the non-free parts, so users can relink. > But I suppose for some reason that's not desired? No. I think we simply didn't think of that, and the GNU site didn't spell it out either. It is a good point for the license FAQ though.

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Variable number of parameters
by Pascal Viandier 19 Mar '06

19 Mar '06

Is there a mechanism in GPC to pass a variable number of parameters to a Pascal procedure (and to know how many they are?). I would like to implement something like the C "sprintf()" in Pascal. Any clue would be welcome. Regards Pascal Viandier

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Re: Changing source code
by cbfalconer＠att.net 16 Mar '06

16 Mar '06

"Prof A Olowofoyeku (The African Chief)" <chiefsoft(a)bigfoot.com> wrote: > > This isn't strictly a GPC question, but it is related, so I'll ask > anyway :| > > Is there an easy way to change a string in all source files to > another string? > > For example, if I want to change all occurrences of "Type foo = > Object (bar)" to "Type Tfoo = Class (Tbar)" in all ".pas" and > ".pp" files in a directory tree, is there an easy way to do it, > using standard GNU tools? I could of course write a program to > do it, but I figured there could be an easier way. Thanks. The standard tool sed comes to mind. Another item that may be useful is id2id-20, available in standard C source at: <http://cbfalconer.home.att.net/download/id2id-20.zip> -- Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com)(cbfalconer@worldnet.att.net) Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems. <http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE worldnet address!

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Re: Redeclarations of predefined ordinal data types
by cbfalconer＠att.net 16 Mar '06

16 Mar '06

Adriaan van Os <gpc(a)microbizz.nl> wrote: > > The following two programs are rejected by gpc > > program redeclare1; > type > Int16 = Integer attribute( size = 16); > Integer = Int16; {error: identifier `Integer' redeclared in a scope > where an outer value was used} > begin > end. > > program redeclare2; > type > Integer = Integer attribute( size = 16); {error: identifier `Integer' > redeclared in a scope where an outer value was used} > begin > end. > > The following program is accepted: > > program redeclare3; > type > Integer = ShortInt; > begin > writeln( 'SizeOf( Integer) = ', SizeOf( Integer)) > end. All right and proper in my view. Once an identifier from an outer scope is used in an inner scope it can no longer be redeclared in that inner scope. Usage has extended its scope. The proper way to create a restricted integer type is: const maxint = 32767; /* for example */ type integer = -maxint .. maxint; which is why these items are predeclared at level 0, rather than reserved words. -- Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com)(cbfalconer@worldnet.att.net) Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems. <http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE worldnet address!

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export vs static
by Pascal Viandier 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

I would like to submit a case on which I spent some time. It occurred with sources converted to GPC from SUN Pascal with an automated script. In the interface section of a module, the following statements: Export MyModule = (A); .... Var A : Integer = 4; attribute(static); .... This module compiles with no complaint. However for all modules importing MyModule -AND- using A, gpc issues the <error undefined reference to 'A'>. The problem is: SUN Pascal understands the "static" directive as in C, so the statements above are correct and work - as in C -, but not for GPC. I know the difference between the two "static" flavours but it would have been of great help if gpc had issued at least a warning when compiling MyModule. Something like: "Cannot export a static variable" had saved me some difficult hours. I did not found any reference to the directive "static" in the 7185 or 10206 standards and the GPC documentation about this is not as clear as it could be. Since I cannot determine if I hit a bug or if it is something one should not bother with, I let you make your own opinion. Kind regards Pascal Viandier

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Strings and standard Pascal
by Waldek Hebisch 14 Mar '06

14 Mar '06

Consider the following program: program fstr(output); type sat = packed array [1..16] of 'K'..'O'; var sa : sat; begin sa := 'OK'; writeln('Sizeof(sa) = ', Sizeof(sa)); writeln(sa) end . ATM it "works". However, it seems that this program is illegal. Namely ISO says: : Each value of a string-type shall be structured as a one-to-one : mapping from an index-domain to a set of components possessing : the char-type And later it again speaks about `the char-type'. So it seems that subranges of char type are _not_ allowed as component types of strings. Form implementation point of view subranges can be packed more tightly then char type, so such restriction make some sense. Now, the question is what shall we do? And do you agree with my reading of the standard? Shall we disallow the program above. Or maybe accept it as an extension, but report an error in standard mode. -- Waldek Hebisch hebisch(a)math.uni.wroc.pl

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