Hi!
I've recently had the unfortunate opportunity of having to invoke gpc/cygwin from a compiling/testing engine that used only MS-DOS file names (i.e., all-caps 8.3).
(if anybody cares, it was University of California at San Diego's PC^2, an ACM Programming Contest management program)
The problem was that, when invoking gpc, the program used the .PAS extension, which gpc didn't recognize as a valid source file, and passed it to the linker.
% gpc FOO.PAS /n/gnu/gcc-2.95.2-gpc-19991030-libg++-2.8.1.3-libgcj-2.95.1/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/2.95.2/real-ld:FOO.PAS: file format not recognized; treating as linker script /n/gnu/gcc-2.95.2-gpc-19991030-libg++-2.8.1.3-libgcj-2.95.1/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/2.95.2/real-ld:FOO.PAS:1: parse error collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
No problem, I though, I just need to insert `-x pascal' before the source filename, as I had done in the gcc and g++ compiling scripts. Unfortunately, it failed too:
% gpc -x pascal FOO.PAS gpc: Internal GPC problem: internal option `--amtmpfile' not given
I ended up having to write a shell-script that would convert the extension to lower case, so it wasn't a show-stopper.
Anyway, I believe it would be nice if gpc were more gcc-like, in the sense of accepting `-x' (and any other flags gcc accepts, for that matter).
Cheers,