atbowler@watmath.UUCP (Alan T. Bowler [SDG]) (10/09/85)
In article <2944@ncsu.UUCP> mauney@ncsu.UUCP (Jon Mauney) writes: >A) Occasionally I feel the need to point out that although Pascal is far > from ideal, it is quite possible to write large programs with separate > compilation while maintaining reasonable portability Unfortunately the pascal standard doesn't agree. Separate compilation is explicitly NOT a feature of standard Pascal, and as a result the normal Fortran/C practice of developing a utility library is not available to someone wanting to write a portable program. It is true that separate compilation is such a desirable feature that most implementors (myself included) define 1 or more ways of doing separate compilation. However, these mechanisms are by all non-standard and the details and semantics vary from implementation to implementation. Textbooks generally only deal with standard pascal, and as a result it is very difficult to teach the idea that you build a large program out of a set of small separately compiled modules.