"J. David Bryan" wrote:
On 12 Oct 2001, at 14:38, CBFalconer wrote:
Your sample above has two faults. It should specify at least (output) in the command line....
I beg to differ. The ISO 7185 Pascal Standard, section 6.10, "Programs," lists the following syntax for the program heading:
program-heading = 'program' identifer [ '(' program-parameter-list ')' ] .
Note that the parenthesized program-parameter-list (e.g., "(output)") is syntactically optional. It is semantically required if the program contains implicit references to "output" (e.g., a "writeln" statement that does not explicitly specify a file variable), but my example did not.
My contention is that output is *ALWAYS* implicitly used, in order to report range errors, etc. I definitely remember that this was included in the original test suite.
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How do I turn on range-checking?
To my knowledge, that is still on the "To Do" list. See the section entitled "Planned features: Misc.", sixth bulleted item.
Horrors. I consider that fundamental. Grafting it in after the fact will be a virtually impossible job, IMO. Depends on how the system is built. I believe it was Urs Amman who wrote an important paper on checking, showing how taking advantage of known ranges etc. can reduce the overhead drastically.
I get the impression that GPC encompasses the full GCC functionality. Is this correct?
I am not sure what is meant by "the full GCC functionality." GPC does use the GCC back end and therefore may take advantage of the optimizer, output formats, etc. provided therein.
I thought I read that it would compile c, cpp, etc source if the source files carried those extensions. That seems to be taken over from GCC, so I assumed that the system was built on top of the existing GCC, including its front end.
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Bug is one thing, but the fact that, even with the standard flag, it fails to flag various errors is my concern.
Well, that's a bug too. I'm sure the intent is to reject everything that does not strictly comply with the selected standard. If GPC doesn't, then it's a bug.
Where is your test suite available?
Again, I must defer to the primary maintainers for an authoritative answer, but I believe that the 2200-plus files that appear in the "test" directory of the source distribution constitute the test suite.
Sorry, I had the impression that you were one of those. Is development moribund? I seem to see no sign of developers other than Frank Hackenbach here.