8.8.1 ptop program

ptop is a source beautifier written by Peter Grogono based on the ancient pretty-printer by Ledgard, Hueras, and Singer, modernized by the Free Pascal team (objects, streams, configurability etc)

This configurability, and the thorough bottom-up design are the advantages of this program over the diverse TurboPascal sourcebeautifiers on e.g. SIMTEL.

The program is quite simple to operate:

ptop ”[-v] [-i indent] [-b bufsize ][-c optsfile] infile outfile”

The Infile parameter is the pascal file to be processed, and will be written to outfile, overwriting an existing outfile if it exists.

Some options modify the behaviour of ptop:

-h

Writes an overview of the possible parameters and commandline syntax.

-c ptop.cfg

Read some configuration data from configuration file instead of using the internal defaults then. A config file is not required, the program can operate without one. See also -g.

-i ident

Sets the number of indent spaces used for BEGIN END; and other blocks.

-b bufsize

Sets the streaming buffersize to bufsize. Default 255, 0 is considered non-valid and ignored.

-v

be verbose. Currently only outputs the number of lines read/written and some error messages.

-g ptop.cfg

Writes a default configuration file to be edited to the file ”ptop.cfg”