According to Frank Heckenbach:

According to myself (Peter Gerwinski):

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What about extending (*$executable-file-name="foo"*) to accept a directory? Or else (*$executable-path-name="/foo"*) and (*$object-path-name="/bar"*)?

I don't agree. The *name* of the executable can be considered part of the program. The *path* where it will be stored will be system dependent, so the path, IMHO, does not belong into the source, but on the commandline (or into a (system or user or project specific) config file, of course).

A directive (*$Foo="Bar"*) is always equivalent to a command-line option `--foo="Bar"'. I was just thinking about reasonable names for these options.

...

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• Passing the actual size for untyped (resp. void) parameters, so it can be access with sizeof.

var x:void -> like C var/const x -> like BP

BP does *not* pass the size of untyped parameters to the procedure. Changing GPC would break compatibility to both C and BP; the latter being unimportant because nobody will consider it a feature *not* to have the size of a variable. OTOH, many C libraries rely on a `void*' parameter *not* being followed by a `size' parameter.

Instead of changing the meaning of `Var foo', we are IMHO better off when introducing a *safe* mechanism to pass variables of varying type (and number). Procedure overloading will be "half the rent". ;-)

For procedural variables, BP uses "@ProcVar" to cast them into a pointer(!!!). gpc does not understand this, but the (more logical, IMHO) "Pointer(ProcVar)". Unfortunately, BP doesn't accept the latter, so AFAICS there's yet no way that works on both. :-( Since we can't change BP, we should make gpc recognize "@ProcVar", perhaps also only in "--borland-pascal".

Okay; I have put it on my list.

Plan: Recognize it, but warn. With `--borland-pascal' (same as (*$borland-pascal*) :-), don't warn.

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 [970624] - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]