On Fri, 20 Jun 1997 01:08:29 +0200 (MET DST) Peter Gerwinski peter@agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de wrote:

[...]

Int8 Word8 = Byte Int16 Word16 Int32 Word32 Int64 Word64

I would vote for this.

[...]

The other thing we must worry about is compatibility to GNU C, because the use of GNU Pascal depends on library written in GNU C. For this reason, `ShortInt', `ShortWord', `ByteInt', and `Byte' must stay like they are; I think it's quite natural then to have `Word' for an unsigned 32-bit Integer. I am not sure whether `int' in GNU C might ever change to be different from `long int'. (DOES SOMEBODY KNOW???) If so, our (my;) choice for the meaning of `LongInt' and `LongWord' might be subject to change. (Note again that I am speaking about types that *are* built-in in GPC with the mentioned meanings.)

Frankly speaking, I find the dissimilarities between GPC and GCC very confusing, and, at times, frustrating. Since GPC depends on GCC, shouldn't the data structures be the same? For example, "long" in GCC means "integer" in GPC, but "int" also means "integer". "Longint" in GPC is not the same as GCC's "long", which would seem to be the sensible thing - but rather, it is the same as GCC's "long long". "Word" seems to be 32-bit in GCC (am I right?), but with the cygwin32 port of GPC, "word" sometimes seems to be 16-bit, and sometimes, 32-bit (judging from all my attempts at wading through the thousands of lines of cygwin32 C headers - again, perhaps I am missing something, but at least, I get very confused at times).

It very soon becomes a very difficult, or, at best, quite error-prone, task, to translate these C headers for use with GPC.

In my ideal world, GPC and GCC data types would follow this logical course;

GCC GPC int integer short shortint word word, cardinal unsigned int word, cardinal unsigned short shortword

long longint {now = integer} unsigned long longword {now = word} long long comp {now = longint, or comp} unsigned long long compword (now = longword}

This is perhaps only useful for easier translation of the GCC headers and therefore may not be a priority - however, I don't think we will ever stop translating those C headers.

However, since the above will most likely break a lot of existing code, perhaps GPC should have built-in data types that mean *exactly* the same thing as they mean in GCC - e.g., "int", "long", "short", etc (in addition to "integer", "longint", "shortint", etc). This will certainly help in translating a lot of those .H files.

Any thoughts on these things? Best regards, The Chief Dr Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief, and the Great Elephant) Author of: Chief's Installer Pro v3.60 for Win16 and Win32. Homepage: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/African_Chief/ E-mail: laa12@cc.keele.ac.uk