Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!sgi!andru@rhialto.SGI.COM
From: andru@rhialto.SGI.COM (Andrew Myers)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Extended Pascal: Lack of Pragmas :-(
Summary: A comment
Message-ID: <23147@sgi.SGI.COM>
Date: 9 Dec 88 19:48:02 GMT
References: <950013@hpclscu.HP.COM>
Sender: daemon@sgi.SGI.COM
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 25

In article <950013@hpclscu.HP.COM>, shankar@hpclscu.HP.COM (Shankar Unni) writes:
> One thing that pisses me off about the Extended Pascal standard is that there
> has been *NO ATTEMPT* to standardise at least a SYNTAX for pragmas within
> the source. Never mind implementing a few like "include" and "if/ifdef" (can
> you see my C bias showing through?)
> 
> Both INCLUDE's and IF/IFDEF's are ESSENTIAL for any program that must be 
> targeted at widely different machines. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not 
> saying that it is impossible to do so (I've heard all the arguments about
> "isolating system-dependent code in modules of their own and re-writing
> them for different systems"), but still, for convenience and efficiency,
> there is no beating conditional compilation.

	The Silicon Graphics version of Pascal (an implementation of
	the ANSI standard) is, by default, run through cpp before the
	parser gets its hooks into the source code. Even if you don't
	have this feature on the system you're using, but do have UNIX,
	you can still use cpp in conjunction with sed to achieve the
	same effect. What's the problem?

	And as Anton Rang pointed out, modern compilers eliminate dead
	code, so you can use boolean constants in place of clunky
	ifdefs without performance degradation.

Andrew