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–a

The –aoption is the old style of basic block profiling for tcov. See

-xprofile=tcovfor information on the new style of profiling and the tcov(1) man page for more details. Also see the manual, Profiling Tools.

The –aoption inserts code to count how many times each basic block is executed. It also calls a runtime recording mechanism that creates a .d file for every .p file at normal termination. The .d file accumulates execution data for the corresponding source file. The tcov(1) utility can then be run on the source file to generate statistics about the program.

If set at compile-time, the TCOVDIR environment variable specifies the directory of where the .d files are located. If this variable is not set, then the

.d files remain in the same directory as the .f files.

The -xprofile=tcovand the -aoptions are compatible in a single executable. That is, you can link a program that contains some files which have been compiled with -xprofile=tcov, and others with -a. You cannot compile a single file with both options.

–Bbinding

The –Boption specifies whether libraries for linking are static (not shared, indicated with -Bstatic), or dynamic (shared, indicated with -Bdynamic).

Link editing is the set of operations necessary to build an executable program from one or more object files. Static linking indicates that the results of these operations are saved to a file. Dynamic linking refers to these operations when performed at runtime. The executable that results from dynamic linking appears in the running process, but is not saved to a file.

–b

It is inefficient for Pascal to send each character to a terminal as it generates its output. It is even less efficient if the output is the input of another program, such as the line printer daemon, lpr(1).

To gain efficiency, Pascal buffers output characters; it saves the characters in memory until the buffer is full and then outputs the entire buffer in one system interaction. By default, Pascal output is line-buffered.

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Pascal 4.0 User’s Guide