According to Phil Nelson:

Thanks MUCH for all your work on gpc. You have greatly improved the compiler!!

Thank you! :-) My next goal are Schema types ... But I am sure that there are still bugs in the new features, especially in the import mechanism.

I do have a couple of questions about the most recent alpha.

...

* Field widths now default to left-justified output.

Did I miss a discussion on this? Doesn't this break a lot of programs? Or is this with "--borland-pascal"?

Perhaps my formulation was misleading: I mean that writeln ( 123 ); will no more yield the output _______123 (with seven blanks), but instead 123 (left-justified). To produce "_______123" you must explicitly say "writeln ( 123 : 10 );". The Standard says that these default widths are implementation-dependent. There was a short discussion about whether GPC's behavior (default width 10 for Integers, 14 for Reals, 6 for Booleans) was a good decision. We soon agreed that it would be better to produce left-justified output when no width has been specified. Otherwise, you would have to say "writeln ( 123 : 1 );" to get the left-justified "123" which is clumsy and misleading. We forgot to post a copy of the discussion to the list; sorry about that. In case you have some arguments to set it back to the previous state, just post it here. (These are only some constants in `rts/rts.h', so it was not much work to change. Perhaps (yet another) command-line switch would satisfy everybody?)

...

* `For' now accepts components of structured variables as control variables, e.g. "for myarray [ i ]:= 1 to 100 do ...".

Why?

In short: Why not? In long: Indeed, the standard only allows an entire variable in this context. Thank you for pointing me to this; I will make this extension trigger a warning if `--standard-pascal' or `--extended-pascal' has been specified. (With `--pedantic-errors', the warning will be an error message.) But Borland Pascal allows this, I got it "for free" (just changed one line in `gpc-parse.y'), so why not allow it, too? Greetings, Peter Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [970201] maintainer GNU Pascal - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]