Gloria, Jing wrote:

Frank,

thanks for your inputs that I read in the mailing list archives. I was hoping there is an option to allow making the names in lowercase.

Everyone,

can somebody please send me information on how to change the GPC naming schema so that it will generate names that are all in lowercase? At this point I am willing to take a chance and rebuild my GPC compiler if it will generate all lowercase names.

I have Pascal procedures/functions that are called by both Pascal and C modules. Global variables are used in both C and Pascal modules. There are close to 100 global variables and around sixty Pascal procedures/functions shared by both C and Pascal. All these scattered over 500 Pascal and C source files. The C modules use all lowercase for the names. So I either convert the C files to have first character uppercase names or add asmname in the Pascal files.

As I said in the other mail, the naming will be changed when we add qualified identifiers. These names (like `foo.bar' perhaps) won't occur in C at all. (And I consider this a good thing, since it also avoids conflicts.)

So, again, the only reliable way (in the long run) is to add `asmname', so you might as well do it now. ;-) Most of the changes can probably done by relatively simple search/replace operations.

Turning the naming to lower-case right now is likely to cause conflicts with library routines -- e.g., if you happen to declare a variable `Time', it will conflict with the `time()' function. Even worse, due to the way the linker works, it will not produce a compile-time error, but silently shadow the library function, so in this example, any call to time() (as, e.g., the RTS does for GetTimeStamp etc.) will jump to the address of your variable and result in mysterious crashes.

Besides, making your local changes in GPC might be feasible for now, but it means that you will have to keep track of and resolve conflicts with further changes in GPC (as I said, the qualified identifers will certainly cause big conflicts, but any other change in this area could become a problem for you then).

Honestly, I'm quite convinced that all this is much more effort than adding `asmname' once in 160 places (which should take less than 5 minutes in my humble estimation ;-).

Frank

PS: Can you please turn off HTML in mails?