[fpc-devel]BUGS!

[Alan Grimes]

New bug: 

Each source file includes a GPL notice.  -- FINE --

WHERE IS THE TEXTUAL DESCRIPTION OF WHAT THE FILE DOES/CAN DO? 

Should I *really* have to scan through the entire file, locating all
symbol names and finding all comments? 

I am not an elite codemeister; I really can't gain much from just
looking at code and trying to figure out where in the puzzle it fits...
Pascal is a great language for readability, but it is not *that*
great... 

> If you are referring to the list of reserved keywords, then the page 
> numbers will not be added; They would confuse matters IMHO.

> You can, however, look in the index for the page numbers, that is what 
> an index is for.

An index of the reserved keywords is __NOT__ in the refferance manual.

>> 4. Documentation (part II): While your syntax diagrams are a nice
>> innovation (Its the first time I have read a language text that used
>> them), A thourough discussion of the *symantics* of the varrious
>> language features seems to be missing. Of particular interest to me 
>> is what exactly "PROGRAM" means to the compiler.

> That an executable module follows, of course ? I don't understand what
> you mean with this. Could you give more examples ? I'll be glad to add
> more explanations.

/me has thought about it some more and decided that the manual is just
fine for a refferance manual, What I really need is a text that will get
me back up to speed on the language and its philosophies. The last time
I worked with Pascal was in Highschool on Xenith XTs, with no HD... =\ 

For your information, there is a wide variety of concepts and
terminology surrounding many programming paradigms. Each language is its
own "ontology", Just saying something is a "program" doesn't cut it
because the it can mean different things in different operating systems.
The Pascal "Program" mapps almost perfectly onto DOS, but Unix uses the
"process" which has evolved to be significantly more sophisticated, I
don't fully understand how daemon processes work, but they are
significantly different than a simple "DO THIS" program... 

The threading support in Linux suggests that one implement "Concurrent
Pascal", as mentioned by Stallings in Operating Systems, second ed. 

I still have the lab hand-out packet, but it was written by a trio of
female tax-suckers; not nearly as deep as I need it to be... It barely
gets into files much less the details of seperate compilation and the
equivalent header files (units?)...

Reading through the manuals available on the website some more I find
refferance to a compiler manual which, presumably, includes a
walkthrough of the compiler source... However this document is not on
the website.

-- 
Waiting for a typical DOS application to crash is like waiting for hell
to freeze over.
http://users.erols.com/alangrimes/  <my website.