CLC-INTERCAL Reference

... The command-line compiler tool

Table of contents:

• Parent directory
• The command-line compiler tool
• Command-line options

The command-line compiler tool

Starting from CLC-INTERCAL 1.-94, the preferred method to compile programs is to use the Integrated Programming Environment, sick (which stands for Superior INTERCAL Compiler Kluge or something like that). A program compatible with the old "oo, ick" is planned and will be made available if and when.

sick requires CLC-INTERCAL 1.-94 and newer. It won't work with older versions.

Although there are plans to provide some sort of interesting user interface to sick, at present it only works in batch mode, compiling programs using options specified on the command line, and either producing objects or running the program as soon as the compiler finishes.

The arguments on the command line are either options (in the form --name=value or -xvalue), or filenames. If a filename is encountered, it is immediately compiled with the options which precede it in the command line, and then optionally executed. After processing the command line, sick terminates.

Command-line options

There is a large number of command-line options, which are grouped by type for easy reference.

Source character set options

Before compiling a program, sick needs to know what character set has been used to encode the source. These days it's mostly ASCII but you never can tell. The default is --guess.

See the chapter about character sets for more information on supported character sets.

Compiler options

Once sick has loaded the source, and converted it to ASCII if necessary, it needs to compile it. This requires loading a compiler object and any necessary compiler options and extensions. This is done by specifying preloads, which, as the name suggests, are loaded before the program source. If no preloads are specified, sick attempts to guess the correct list of preloads by looking at the program suffix (or an alternative suffix specified on the command line).

By default, the compiler pretends to be itself, which means that the rules described here are valid; specifying --imitate causes the compiler to pretend it's somebody else, and use different rules, which will be described later. The default value can be requested explicitely with --imitate=sick or --clc-intercal

The suffix-based guessing of preloads relies on the the sickrc files found, which in turn depends on which extensions are installed, on which directories are specified with the --include option, and whether user and system sickrc files are considered: see Misc options below, and also see the sickrc specification). The defaults provided with the distributions will use the following table (if a suffix belongs to more than one row, it will use the first matching one):

If the compiler is making an attempt of imitatind C-INTERCAL, because you said --imitate=ick or --c-intercalM, the suffix rules will be:

If the compiler is making an attempt of imitatind Traditional INTERCAL, because you said --imitate=1972, --intercal-72 or --intercal-1972, the suffix rules will be:

In addition to the above, extra letters can be present between the spot and the rest of the suffix, indicating extra preloads. Such extra letters can only be used with the ick or sick compilers, because 1972, iacc and iasm do not accept options or extensions.

If more than one base is specified, the first one matched by the sickrc files will be used: in the default, this is the highest base found on the suffix, so for example ".563i" means base 6.

CLC-INTERCAL 1.-94.-2 no longer includes the INTERNET extensions by default. When this extension is installed, an extra letter, "r" will be accepted in the suffix to preload it.

Not all these extra options are compatible with ick. See also the chapter about compiler extensions.

Normally, specifying any preloads on the command line disables the preload guess, which means that one might need to specify everything the guess would add. The --add-preloads (or -A) option asks to do the preload guess, then add to the result any preloads specified on the command line: it can be used, for example, to add threads support to sick: the ".ti" suffix would change the compiler to ick, but using -Apthick would use the normal preloads and then add thick. Consider the command:

    sick --add-preloads --preload=thick my-threaded-program.gi

Code generation options

Once the program source has been compiled, sick needs to use a module to generate the actual code. The default is Object, which produces an INTERCAL object, which can be executed directly or loaded back into sick as a preload.

The --backend option takes a comma-separated list of compiler back ends to run. The default is --backend=Object which saves the object to file using the default output file name or the value of any --output option in effect at that point. If more than one backend is specified, they will be executed in order, for example:

	sick --backend Run,Run,Object prog.i

The --output option recognises some special characters in the string passed to it: %p will be replaced by the name of the source file without the suffix and %o by the original name specified on the command line with the suffix removed: the difference is that when the compiler uses the search path to locate the program, %p could have a directory added to it to indicate where the source was found, while %o will be the name as typed. The %s sequence expands to a backend-supplied suffix, and %% is replaced by a single "%". The default is %p.%s. which means that the object is placed in the same directory where the source was found, but with a new suffix. To produce an executable without a suffix, specify "--output=%p"

If the --directory option is present, all objects are sent to that directory, even if the name produced by --output specifies a different directory.

The following backends are currently provided:

If an output file name is not specified with --output, the backend will generate a file name by appending its own suffix (shown in the table) to the base name of the source program.

If --directory is specified, it will replace the directory part on all output names. This works whether --output provides a name, or the backend's default is used. Specifying an empty string reinstates the default of using the source file's directory. Note that if --output specifies an absolute path, this will be used in the absence of a --directory but ignored if --directory is present.

Objects produced by the Object and Perl backends will accept the following command-line arguments when executed:

Misc options

The following options control the way sick operates:

User interface options

At the time of writing, sick does not use any interface: it just gets its orders from the command line, does what it needs to do, and terminates. A future version may do more. In the meantime, a number of command-line options allow to select a user interface, although this selection is currently ignored.

CLC-INTERCAL 1.-94.-2 no longer includes the user interfaces in the Base distribution: these are available as separate packages with name UI-Interface, for example UI-X, UI-Curses or UI-Line. This allows new interfaces to be developed and distributed separately.