Hi everybody,

I was reported several errors resulting from the decapitalization of the main program's name, e.g.

Program Log;

begin writeln ( ln ( 2.7184 ) ); end.

crashed because the program's name was decapitalized, i.e. "Log" was mapped to "log" which did hide the function in libm.a ...

One could think about letting the program name like it is, say "Log". But (as Juki writes in gpc-util.c :-) the standard says that the program's name has to go into a separate name space i.e. mustn't be visible inside the program's declaration part and body.

I solved the problem by mapping "Name" to "program_Name" instead of "name". But this is not the end of the story.

Borland Pascal defines so-called qualified identifiers:

Program Foo;

Function writeln: Real;

begin (* writeln *) writeln:= 2.7184; end (* writeln *);

begin System.writeln ( Foo.writeln ); end.

So the program's name *must* go into its declaration part and body -- and we have a classical tragedy.

How to proceed? I think Borland Pascal's qualified identifiers are important and must be implemented, one day. Introduce another command line switch?

My own suggestion follows. ;-)

We should "clean up" Pascal standards in the future by making the (existing) command line switches to force one standard:

--standard-pascal --extended-pascal --borland-pascal ...

Without any switch, GPC will try to support *all* standards and warn about misuse (e.g. Borland's typed constants as initialized variables). The default for this case would be to *have* qualified identifiers (i.e. "Program Log" would yield "Log", not "log" and not "program_Log"); with "--standard-pascal" or "--extended-pascal" it would separate the program's name from the rest of the world (and create "program_Log").

Yours,

Peter

e-mail: peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de home address: D"usseldorfer Str. 35, 45145 Essen, Germany WWW: http://agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de/~peter/