I certainly don't object to identifying explicit ISO standards by their respective numbers, as you suggest. OTOH, we shouldn't have a myriad of ways of doing (specifying) the same thing.

As you are no doubt aware, my concern with the "--standard-pascal" flag is that it infers that there is only one standard for Pascal. This is unfortunate, since the Extended Pascal Standard is just as much a standard, yet far too few people are even aware of it! Unless you (well, CBF actually;-) want to argue that "Extended Pascal" is not really Pascal, then use of the "--standard-pascal" flag is ambiguous at best.

Anyway, if there is too much resistance to dropping the ambiguous "--standard-pascal" flag, we should at least discourage it's use in the documentation. For example, we could say something like : "--standard-pascal ... synonym for --classic-pascal".

Joe.

-----Original Message----- From: Tom Verhoeff [SMTP:wstomv@win.tue.nl] Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 5:33 PM To: gpc@gnu.de Subject: Re: Dropping `--standard-pascal', `foo

...

CBFalconer wrote:

...

Frank Heckenbach wrote:

...

in the course of cleaning up GPC, I plan to drop the following obsolete "features".

• `--standard-pascal[-level-1]' (and the corresponding compiler directives). GPC has `--classic-pascal[-level-1]' now to distinguish it better from Extended Pascal (which also is a standard).

• The syntax `type foo = procedure (Integer, Real)' (i.e., without parameter names).

If you have any objections against removing them, please respond soon.

I strongly disagree. The very words "standard Pascal" intrinsically reference ISO 7185, and "Extended Pascal" correlates directly with the verbiage in ISO 10206. Without these directives/flags the user is left groping about in the documentation to find the appropriate magic incantations for proper validation.

I don't think typing `--standard-pascal' is any easier to use than `--classic-pascal' (in fact, it's even one letter more to type ;-). I'm also not sure whether someone new to GPC would guess `--standard-pascal' without looking in the manual (e.g., Invoking GPC -> GPC Options where the most common options are listed, including `--classic-pascal').

Just in case you misunderstood me here: I'm not going to remove the ISO 7185 support. I just want to remove one of the two equivalent switches to activate it.

I do not think that the number of key strokes matters here. Neither standard-pascal nor classic-pascal are unambiguous terms (though they would do if documented properly).

May I propose to call the option iso7185-pascal. The same number of key strokes as classic-pascal, but, in my humble opinion, unambiguous.

Tom

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