In message 200307282355.BAA17434@goedel.fjf.gnu.de, Frank Heckenbach frank@g-n-u.de writes
Adriaan van Os wrote:
Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Adriaan van Os wrote:
Some more in Apple UCSD Pascal (just for the record)
- A compilation can be a program, or one or more units separated
with semicolons and ending with a period.
Several units separated with semicolons? Strange. Kind of contradicts the meaning of "unit" (in the common meaning of the word) to me ...
There will have been pragmatic reasons for it, way back in 1980. With 64 or 128 Kbyte memory you need a lot of segmentation and chaining, therefore small units. There was no --automake feature.
But why couldn't they be in separate files (or at least in one file without special syntax, i.e. `unit Foo ... end. unti Bar ... end.', like GPC used to allow)? Without automake, this should have been better, since one would have been able to compile just some of the units, not everything if everything is in one file.
My recollection is that the original UCSD operating system only supported volumes with a maximum of 77? files so there was some pressure to minimise the number of files.