strangest systems I've sent email from

[Jon Elson]

On 04/25/2016 12:30 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 04/25/2016 09:39 AM, Jon Elson wrote:
>
>> I used it to port a couple of my programs from (Ughhh!) Borland
>> Turbo Pascal for Windows to Linux, and it was a surprisingly painless
>> job. The only thing I notice is the error messages look exactly like
>> Borland error messages on DOS.  (Error 132 at 1B7F sort of thing.)
> Historically, one of my pet peeves with compiler writers.  IBM 704
> FORTRAN had better and clearer diagnostics than many of today's compilers.
>
Linux compilers usually have decent diagnostics at compile 
time, and at least describe the error a bit at run time, 
rather than give an error code.  I have no idea whether gdb 
will give any help on a run time error in a FPC program, but 
I have a funny feeling that they haven't linked in the 
requires stuff to do that, just from the message.  I have 
debugged some c and c++ programs with gdb, and while it is a 
tad cryptic, it is quite powerful, you can examine variables 
and pointers and track down what is wrong.

Since I had working Pascal programs and was just porting, I 
worked through the few errors pretty blindly, but wouldn't 
want to do that with a new program.

Jon