The current state of Pascal-P6 is that the header files are parsed automatically, and any options are parsed manually. The drawbacks to this are:
The options must appear at the end, since the header files are already parsed before the program executes.
Filenames are parsed from the command line, even if the file is not going to be used (like prr and prd files).
The advantage of the current system is it stays completely compatible with ISO 7185 Pascal.
Proposed
The proposal involves two steps:
An option is added that stops parsing of the header files.
The header file parsing is expanded to include file parsing and options anywhere on the command line.
The result will still be compatible with ISO 7185 by option. The options will be parsed no matter where they are on the command line. For files, one or more files can be elided. In this case, reading from or writing to those elided files yields an error.
Adding header parsing
The state now
The current state of Pascal-P6 is that the header files are parsed automatically, and any options are parsed manually. The drawbacks to this are:
The advantage of the current system is it stays completely compatible with ISO 7185 Pascal.
Proposed
The proposal involves two steps:
The result will still be compatible with ISO 7185 by option. The options will be parsed no matter where they are on the command line. For files, one or more files can be elided. In this case, reading from or writing to those elided files yields an error.