Re: RFC on not documenting -fpreprocessed, -fmodule-private options.

[Brooks Moses <brooks dot moses at codesourcery dot com>]

Brooks Moses wrote:
> On -fpreprocessed: This is used for communication between the gfortran 
> and f951 executables, to indicate that f951 is being passed a 
> preprocessed version of the file and should look in the file to find the 
> original filename to use for include-path and error-message purposes.
>
> I don't see any way that this would be very useful for an end user.  One 
> can't pipe the output of a preprocessor into gfortran, and if one 
> manually runs a file through a preprocessor and then compiles the 
> resulting output file, it almost certainly makes more sense to treat 
> this resulting output file as the source file.  (Besides which, I don't 
> think there's any guarantee that the output file would have the 
> "original source file" information in it in the way gfortran expects.)
>
> Thus, my suggestion would be to leave -fpreprocessed undocumented, and 
> set it as Undocumented in lang.opt.  Thoughts?

For the record, setting it Undocumented doesn't do a thing, since it's 
documented in C and other languages.  Guess I'll have to document it, 
after all.  :)

On the other hand, I'm not sure it does what I think it does, at least 
from an end-user perspective -- given a file that's the output of a 
preprocessor, the error messages refer to the original file and line 
number regardless of whether -fpreprocessed is given.  But it does turn 
off preprocessor directives on .F90 files.

Since that does no more and no less than what's described in gcc.pdf 
under "preprocessor directives", I don't see a need to copy that 
documentation into gfortran.pdf, but I'll be glad to do it if there are 
objections to that idea.

- Brooks