I discussed a while ago with Daniel Jacobowitz the possibility of adding some basic tests for pascal language support.

My main problem is that I never used anything like expect of autoconf before.

The first step is to add a new directory called gdb.pascal in gdb/testsuite directory. But I am already lost here: I saw in the sources that I should add reference to this directory in configure.ac but if I run autoconf after the configure script is changed a lot. I read in the Contribute file that we do not need to commit the regenerated configure file, but if we want to check the effect before committing, the fact that the regenerated configure is different from the one automatically regenerated on the CVS repository might lead to unnoticed problems.

The second point is that there are mainly two free pascal compiler: GNU pascal, (gpc executable) and Free Pascal, (fpc executable) The pascal testsuite will probably need to be handled a little bit differently depending on which pascal compiler is used (the command line options are completely different for the two compilers).

Furthermore, none of these two compilers are included by default on all platform, as can be expected for GCC. This means that we need to find a way to check for the presence of a valid pascal compiler. There might be some equivalent code for fortran or ada compilers, but these seem to be special switches of gcc whereas both gpc and fpc.

So the main question is where should I include code to test for the presence of a valid pascal compiler and how to only run the tests in gdb.pascal if a valid compiler was found.

Pierre Muller Maintainer of GDB pascal language support.

PS1: RFH in the message title stands for 'Request for help', I am not sure it is standard, but hope it is OK.

PS2: specifically for gpc mailinglist: is there a unified and version independent symbol name for the main procedure in the main program? Using 'break main' stops at some <implicit code> The main procedure seems to be called _p__M0_main_program but this is for gpc 20060325 based on gcc 3.4.6 for Ubuntu Is this symbol still valid? Is it supposed to stay unchanged in future releases? To be able to break at the first line of the main procedure seems like a minimal requirement that is not met for GPC and GDB right now.