Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Rick Engebretson wrote:
The EXPECT extension to TCL is made for controlling and communicating with other user specific programs. Pascal user specific programs would be perfect.
TCL was developed at UCBerkeley and Sun. Expect was developed at the US NIST. Nice, stable, well documented, public domain software.
Pascal is the weak link. You are very talented people with GPC. I really appreciate CBFalconer's concerns.
I'm sorry, but your mail is rather vague. I use Pascal (GPC) programs for various purposes all the time, including being called by as well as calling shell scripts or binaries written in other languages etc.
I use expect rather rarely, since for normal tasks, a shell (sh or bash) script seems less overhead and more portable. (And with one slightly more complex expect script, I had problems between expect versions which I never really figured out.) Expect's main use to me is when you need to control pseudo terminals. Anyway, I see no particular problems calling GPC programs from expect scripts.
What exactly are you calling for?
Frank
I think my first email described TCL and Pascal, quite some time ago. I've pushed various TCL extensions that add different things, especially on the linux platform. My message is consistent from the start and exactly reflects the TCL shell design and interface philosophy. Brent Welch's books are great references. TCL adds functionality by linking in packages, just like pascal is supposed to. They don't seriously mess with the core. They have archives.
FPC has dozens of units. A Linux unit, ncurses unit, IPC unit..... And archives. And documentation.... And FPC and GPC are incompatible. But that is FPC and not GNU.
What I'm calling for is this; If you want to work with a proprietary pascal vendor, that is your priviledge, and I'm sure it will be a great product. But why drag Gnu Pascal into this new business venture ??
A simple, core Gnu Pascal conforming to well defined standards is all I have asked for from the start. You have made progress to this end. I don't need flag bloat, and bells and whistles and "implicit pointers". For instrumentation, I need a pascal I can trust.