According to The African Chief:

This is getting very interesting :-) We now have many different versions of FillChar! Which should I use?

One that works, and among those the fastest one.

...

BTW, pointer arithmetics ... should GPC allow constructions like

(*$X+*)

Var
  p, q: ^Char;

p:= q + 42;

or only

p:= succ ( q, 42 ); ?

Personally, I would prefer to allow only the second (Pointer being an ordinal type) and to consider the first (Pointer + Integer) an error, but it's technically easier to allow both, so I ask before I remove a bug somebody might consider a feature. ;-)

Personally, I would keep both. I am not in favour of imposing restrictions on programmers, unless it is for their own good! I suppose we could assume that anyone who wants to use the first permutation knows what he/she is doing.

One "pro" for keeping both is that "Pointer - Pointer" yields an Integer, so "Pointer + Integer" should work too and act as a reverse of the first.

PS: - another point entirely; is there a switch that will enable a particular unit (in this case SYSTEM.PAS) to be used automatically, without putting it manually in the USES clause of every source file? I am looking for something like

"--auto-use=xxx.pas,yyy.pas,f:\gpc\zzz.pas",

which I can then use from the command line, or put into to GPCC.CFG file.

This is planned, and `--auto-use=...' is a good suggestion for the name. Okay with everybody? (Or perhaps `--auto-uses=...'? Or just `--uses=...'?)

Peter

Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [971005] maintainer GNU Pascal [971001] - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [971005]