J. David Bryan wrote:
It isn't so much a matter of writing as of reading. A module declared with:
module ifmod external;
...clearly shows that everything contained in the module is supplied by an external entity,
... which, in my experience, is (or should be) rarely the case, since C routines have C-ish interfaces which often need wrappers to convert them to Pascal-ish form.
whereas:
module ifmod;
...with dozens or perhaps hundreds of "external" directives on individual procedures, variables, etc. makes it much harder to determine by inspection whether anything is supplied in the (Pascal) module implementation.
Why not by inspection of the module implementation? ;-)
Well, if you want to implement it, just go ahead. I won't spend my time on it since, as I said, I don't consider it too useful, and even somewhat bad in that it may encourage people to not write the Pascal wrappers so they can use the "simpler" external interface declaration, and so the C semantics will spread unnecessarily to the higher-level Pascal code. It's a matter of style sure, but experience shows that many people are lazy and will happily chose a worse solution if it just has some superficial advantage. (But as I said, if you want to implement it, I won't reject it. But I suggest you first research if there is any other compiler with such a feature, so that, in case there is, we'll at least be compatible if possible.)
Frank