[fpc-devel] Porting FPC to IBM zArch

[Bernd Oppolzer]

minor correction: the substitute (/ /) is for array indices [ ], not for 
comments.

This looks like a matter of taste, but if there were significant amounts of
legacy source code using this, this could be of concern.

(I don't know, if this is the case - I have such programs, because (/ /) 
was
allowed in some old Pascals including the descendents of the Wirth 
compilers -
Stanford, VS/PASCAL of IBM and the one that we had at the Stuttgart 
university
in the late 70s / early 80s on the Telefunken TR 440 - probably no one here
will know this machine and the opsys BS3 - I was only 18 years old when 
I started
Pascal programming on this machine, today I'm 54).

-> is a substitute for the pointer symbol; other symbols used for this 
are ^ and @

Kind regards

Bernd



Am 24.07.2013 12:37, schrieb Mark Morgan Lloyd:
> Jonas Maebe wrote:
>> On 24 Jul 2013, at 03:41, Bernd Oppolzer wrote:
>
>>> - Stanford Pascal (my version) allows (. .) and (/ /) as substitutes 
>>> for [ ]
>>
>> FPC also supports (. and .). It doesn't support (/ and /) though. 
>> Support for that could maybe be added under a new syntax mode or mode 
>> switch switch, but is this a common syntax? I've never heard of that 
>> one before.
>
> I'd suggest avoiding (/ /) as comments.
>
> Vector Pascal allows e.g. \+ as a reduction-addition operator, if FPC 
> ever considered implementing anything like this it would be desirable 
> to have \ and / unencumbered.
>
> http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/%7Ewpc/reports/compilers/compilerindex/vp-ver2.html 
>
>