On 3 Jan 2001, at 5:05, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
I'm separating out this point from the reply concerning syntax...
Clive Rodgers wrote:
As another ex-Algol60 (my first language on an Elliot 503, just to show my age!) this is quite natural but I am not sure that there is that much to recommend it since it would make the program much less portable to other Pascal environments. I think the gpc team should be careful not to go too far down a divergent route. After all, open standards are there for guidance and to avoid some of the more destructive activities of certain Large Companies and it would be a little hypocritical of open source advocates to follow this bad example.
Yes, but let me claim that (partly due to the influence of a certain Large Company), this has already happened. Basically, in the "Pascal world", there are (at least) two different "continents", the standard one (Standard Pascal, Extended Pascal) and the Borland one (Turbo Pascal, Delphi), and there doesn't seem to be any sign of them converging again -- i.e., neither from Borland nor any maker of other compilers focussed on BP compatibility I've seen any intent of becoming standard conforming (or anywhere close to it), and OTOH many BP features are no likely candidates for inclusion into a future Pascal standard (if there will ever be any).
[...]
Well argued, Frank. Objections about compatibility with other Pascal compilers can be adequately dealt with by rejecting GPC extensions if another standard is switched on.
As a consequence, since I'm quite tired of using such work-arounds in my code, I really "have" to use a combination of both, and AFAIK, GPC is the only compiler to offer that. So, almost all of my code requires GPC for that reason and I don't make it any less compiler-portable by using any (existing or new) GPC extensions.
True.
I might think different about it if there was any evidence for other compilers supporting this combination, but from all I've seen it's quite a safe bet this will never happen. (Another thing is that I don't consider compiler-portability nearly as important as system-portability, since what do I gain if I can compile my sources with 5 different compilers, but all on the same 3 or 4 systems...)
As someone who writes general purpose Pascal libraries I need my code to compile with as many compilers as possible. System-portability is not the only issue here.
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