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.
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