[RFH] adding gdb.pascal subdir

["Pierre Muller" <muller at ics dot u-strasbg dot fr>]

 I discussed a while ago with Daniel Jacobowitz 
the possibility of adding some basic tests for pascal language support.

  My main problem is that I never used anything like expect of autoconf
before.

  The first step is to add a new directory called gdb.pascal in
gdb/testsuite directory.
But I am already lost here:
  I saw in the sources that I should add reference to this directory in
configure.ac but if I run autoconf after the configure script is changed a
lot.
I read in the Contribute file that we do not need to commit the regenerated
configure file,
but if we want to check the effect before committing, the fact that
the regenerated configure is different from the one automatically 
regenerated on the CVS repository might lead to unnoticed problems.

  The second point is that there are mainly two free pascal compiler:
GNU pascal, (gpc executable)
and 
Free Pascal, (fpc executable)
  The pascal testsuite will probably need to be handled 
a little bit differently depending on which pascal compiler is used
(the command line options are completely different for the two compilers).
  
  Furthermore, none of these two compilers are included by default
on all platform, as can be expected for GCC.
  This means that we need to find a way to check for the presence of
a valid pascal compiler. There might be some equivalent code 
for fortran or ada compilers, but these seem to be
special switches of gcc whereas both gpc and fpc.

  So the main question is where should I include code 
to test for the presence of a valid pascal compiler
and how to only run the tests in gdb.pascal 
if a valid compiler was found.

Pierre Muller
Maintainer of GDB pascal language support.

PS1: RFH in the message title stands for 'Request for help', I am not sure
it is standard, 
but hope it is OK.

PS2: specifically for gpc mailinglist:
is there a unified and version independent symbol name for
the main procedure in the main program?
Using 'break main'
stops at some  <implicit code>
The main procedure seems to be called
_p__M0_main_program 
but this is for gpc 20060325 based on gcc 3.4.6 for Ubuntu
Is this symbol still valid?
Is it supposed to stay unchanged in future releases?
To be able to break at the first line of the main procedure
seems like a minimal requirement that is not met for GPC
and GDB right now.