Peter Gerwinski wrote:

If you really must rely on C headers which change from time to time,

...or from system to system...

it is probably the most reasonable thing to write a C module which uses the header files and exports some well-defined functions. Then you can write a Unit which imports these functions as `external' functions and makes them accessible for your Pascal program.

That's what I did. Specifically, I needed a routine to measure the CPU time. There is a C routine declared in time.h, but it uses a constant (#define) and a type (typedef). The value of the constant, and even the type (int or float) can vary on different systems, AFAIK. So the only way to use it in Pascal - without modifying the program on every system - is to write a Pascal wrapper, or is there any easier way?

Another thing I did experiments with was a C program which includes the header files and writes out Pascal source for all constants defined in the header.

Wouldn't exactly make the program building process easier... :-| And, as I see it, there's no way to handle types defined in the C header, is there? (Well, there are not too many types in C programs, but anyway... :-)

According to Sven Engelhardt:

...

nb. any way to issue linker-options (-lxxx -L) as preprocessor- directives, so one could write rater developer-friendly code.

This is planned.

My idea was to make "(*$L foo.o *)" equivalent to a file name `foo.o' given in the command line. One could also make "(*$L /usr/lib *)" equivalent to "-L /usr/lib" because GPC can check whether the given name refers to a file or a directory.

Something to add to this: it would be great if one could give a C file which would be compiled (if necessary) and the resulting object linked in, like {$L foo.c}.

Then one could make any Pascal program with --automake, even if it uses some C files.

BTW: Is it allowed with the current versions to give C files on the command line? I tried the following with the 0226 or 0227 version:

gpc -o homology gettime.c sysdep.pas calc_hom.pas homology.pas

With DJGPP, this works fine. But with Linux, it gives the message:

In file included from /usr/include/features.h:134, from /usr/include/time.h:26, from gettime.h:4, from gettime.c:4: /usr/include/sys/cdefs.h:40: parse error

However, the following works with Linux:

gcc -c gettime.c gpc -o homology gettime.o sysdep.pas calc_hom.pas homology.pas

Is this an installation problem on my system or a general problem?