OpenVMS Pascal Release History - Inclusion of %IF, %ELSE, %ELIF, %ENDIF directives?

[Mark_Corcoran]

I've been looking at making changes to chunks of code across some source modules to introduce conditional compilation.

The code doesn't really achieve what the business wants and needs to be replaced, but I'd like to temporarily leave old functionality in the source code, just not compiled.

The code involved has lots of end-of-line comments, or groups of lines commented out using standard Pascal comments - {} or (**), and since you can't nest comments, I wanted to use conditional compilation.

The soft copy of the HP Pascal Language Reference Manual I have is for HP Pascal V5.8 for OpenVMS/VAX (AA-PWVSD-TK, JAN-2005), and references the directives mentioned in the subject header.

The version of the Pascal compiled installed is V5.5-54, and the release notes file in SYS$HELP gives a date of 24-JUL-1996.

Attempting to use the directives don't work.

An interview with John Reagan (dated 18-FEB-2000) that appears here (http://pascal.hansotten.com/vaxvms-pascal/) says "Most recently, I designed and co-implemented the conditional compilation facility in Compaq Pascal."

I would presume therefore that the directives were added at some point between V5.5-54 and V5.8

Does anyone happen to know in what version this functionality was included?

Mark