Peter Gerwinski wrote:

According to Frank Heckenbach:

...

Until a (more optimized) version of them will be built in, here are some replacements (a bit slower, but should be portable and generate no warnings): [...]

Pointer arithmetics is portable and can be used here to speed it up:

Procedure FillChar ( Var Dest: Void; Count: Integer; C: Char );

Var
  DestArray: tCharArray absolute Dest;
  z: ^Char;

begin (* FillChar *)
  for z:= @DestArray [ 0 ] to @DestArray [ Count - 1 ] do
    z^:= C;
end (* FillChar *);

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

(Similar for `move'.)

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.

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.

Best regards, The Chief -------- Dr. Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) Email: laa12@keele.ac.uk Author of: Chief's Installer Pro 4.01 for Win16 and Win32: Winner of PC PLUS Magazine Gold Award (April 1995 U.K. edition) http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/African_Chief/

ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/ibmpc/win3/apps/chief/pro/chief401.zip