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From: bartonr@psu-cs.UUCP (Robert Barton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.modula2
Subject: Is this a compiler bug?
Message-ID: <1712@psu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 2 Mar 89 05:41:42 GMT
Reply-To: bartonr@psu-cs.UUCP (Robert Barton)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Portland State University; Portland OR
Lines: 19


  I have a variable, called code, representing a word of machine code
which consists of one or more bit fields of various sizes.  Since I will
be doing a number of bit manipulation operations on this variable it has
been declared with type BITSET.  However for testing purposes it will be
useful to assign code various values within a given range using a loop.
Now the problem: using the statement

  INC(CARDINAL(code), 1);

the compiler gives an error message of "variable expected".  Does this
sound like a compiler bug or an error on my part?  The references I have
read indicate that INC should take any ordinal type, including CARDINAL.
BITSET and CARDINAL are both 16 bits in this implementation.  Using

  code := BITSET(CARDINAL(code) + 1);

is acceptable to the compiler, so I can work around it, but I'm just
wondering if anyone else has come across this.