Well, Unfortunately, this is bad for us here. SVS and some of the old Oasis Pascal and other Pascal compiler developed back in the mid and early 1980s allowed this split interface/implementation method declaration in different Units.

This allows one Unit to act as a sort of header file (like in C) and the other Unit to actually define the function. In this way, you can have a global type repository of Units that only contain Interface declarations. When dealing with an App like ours where you are dealing with 500000 to 900000 lines of code in 200-400 files in 10+ project trees, changing something as simple as this could end up being a hufe proposition. That would be on top of the changes to FILLCHARing records, Strings that aren't of the "BP String" type, and other differences we find.

As for Mangled Names? Are you going to move more towards name Mangling much like FPC uses? If so, couldn't create a flag that would just keep all functions from using the Mangled Name? FPC does things much in this way, and I worked on modifying the compiler to allow this method in split interface/implementation type of thing. I ran into other problems getting it to work correctly (I'll spare the list the details) but for the most part, it worked.

Adam

-----Original Message----- From: Frank Heckenbach [mailto:frank@g-n-u.de] Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 7:09 PM To: gpc@gnu.de Subject: Re: Is this a bug that is planning to be fixed (from documentatio n)?

Oldham, Adam wrote:

So, once this bug is fixed, will function declarations in the interface

and

function bodies in implementation sections of different files be allowed, like they are today?

Different files for the same module, yes (unfortunately, since EP more or less requires this, though it doesn't directly talk about source files). Different units/modules, no.

And if not, can the bug sort of be left for compatibility with other Pascal Languages that do utilize this method?

Say

with maybe a command line parameter?

Which compiler uses this method? I only know compilers that require such routines to be declared as `external' or similar, and GPC will (continue to) allow this as well.

Disabling this check would be easy at first, but once we introduce qualified identifiers, the method won't work, since the implementation would choose another "mangled linker name" (if you don't know what that means, please ignore it) than the interface declaration, and without an explicit specification (such as `external' and/or `asmname'), it won't work.

Frank