On 3 Aug 2006 at 21:21, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Not yet, but I guess we could collect one and put it in the manual.
It would help. I spent an hour "debugging" the string comparison behavior change in a program I recently wrote, thinking, "This comparison test _must_ work...." I only began to understand by looking at the generated assembler, seeing the call to __p_EQ, looking that up in the RTS, recalling that there were --[no-]exact-compare-strings compiler options, running tests, and deducing that --gnu-pascal was invoking the option. Not at all obvious, I'm afraid.
You might want to start, perhaps right here in this thread, collecting a list of issues you already know of, then others and I can later fill in what we find ...
I have encountered two so far:
1. fixed-length strings are compared without blank padding
2. default field-width in write statements is 1.
In fact, I made the warnings a bit more extensive (maybe overkill ...), see the test programs.
Thanks for the patch.
-- Dave