According to Kevin A. Foss:
I have to admit I'm in favor of defaulting to ISO standard behavior, but that is just my personal preference. I'm mainly concerned with the last comment... is it true that 'thousands of dos-pascal-programs' will be ported to linux'?
Yes.
There is an incredible number of Borland Pascal programmers out there. Just watch news://comp.lang.pascal.*: most questions, even those posted to comp.lang.pascal.ansi-iso, concern Borland Pascal. Some of them (~50%???) happily change to Delphi and move to Windows 95 without ever looking out of the (MS-) Window. Some others (which I would consider the best ones;) want to try Linux and are looking out for a Pascal compiler.
I don't see a majority of the DOS-based TP programs being all that useful,
Of course not all of that is useful, but enough to make it worth the effort.
In addition: think of games. Not useful, but they can make Linux more attractive. Many games are written in Borland Pascal for DOS. I have heared of game authors who would be happy to have a 32-bit Pascal for DOS. If they see that there is a compiler which supports Linux as well, they will give Linux a try.
or all that many TP programmers perceiving a need to port their software to gpc. Granted there was a lot of good software written with TP and which should be ported, but I think your numbers are over stated.
I think these numbers are realistic. (Just what I guess from conversation with other programmers.)
The comment also begs the question. is gpc's role to provide a facility for porting 10 year old DOS programs or for the creation of new programs? I would think primarily the latter and that decisions on gpc's defaults should serve that end.
GPC is for the creation of new programs. It should provide facilities to port existing programs (all those --command-line-switches), but this should not become our primary goal.
This also guided my decision in favour of a default field width of 0: Most programs written today don't sequentially read in columns of numbers, process them and put out some other columns of numbers. Today's programs process strings and interact with the user; most numbers appear in sentences like Frank's "There are 7 items." Thus GPC's default behaviour should support the latter one; those of us who need the first one (including myself, sometimes) are experienced enough to change GPC's default by configuration, a command-line switch, or even an explicit field width specification. For programs intended to be portable the latter method is the most secure one anyway.
Greetings,
Peter