Anuradha wrote:

We are still stuck with the interface to a database. The 2 major problems are : accessing fields of the packed structures .( it gives the below-described errors) and packing sets. Is there no plan for their implementation ?

Not by me, currently. You know, I work on GPC either for fun or for money (or both). Dealing with such low-level issues is not exactly my idea of fun, and it's not needed for my own GPC projects, or to make GPC more standards compliant, so ...

Of course, this is a free software project, so anyone else can make the changes they like. If they don't break anything else, we'll include them in the official sources.

Doesnot all the databases pack the passed structures?

I don't know exactly, but I guess most databases access the files on a byte level and convert to and from their internal structures explicitly, so they can work with more efficient structures in memory, and use a more compact form on disc (or don't even pack them on the disc if fast access is more important than small file sizes).

...

 We tried compiling a source with gpc-20010924 and made changes to the

records by 'packing' them to suit our needs of reading from already existing files. But then we changed to gpc-20011215 (we had also installed earlier) and these changed programs that compiled in gpc-20010924 , give us errors like :

" Cannot take address of bitfield <a field name>" " packed fields may not be used as `var' parameters "

Can you kindly tell me why this happens because i don't see it as an explicit change made after the 24-09 version.

It may be related to this change:

: 20011213: packed records of (e.g.) 16 bit wide subranges are not : handled correctly is assignments (emil1.pas)

Frank