Hello,

This is a patch regarding a couple of Objective-C related dialect 
options and warning switches.  I have already submitted it a while ago 
but gave up after pinging a couple of times.  I am now informed that 
should have kept pinging until I got someone's attention so I'm 
resending it.

The patch is now against an old revision and as I stated originally it's 
probably not in a state that can be adopted as is.  I'm sending it as is 
so that the implemented features can be assesed in terms of their 
usefulness and if they're welcome I'd be happy to make any necessary 
changes to bring it up-to-date, split it into smaller patches, add 
test-cases and anything else that is deemed necessary.

Here's the relevant text from my initial message:

Two of these switches are related to a feature request I submitted a 
while ago, Bug 56044 
(http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56044).  I won't reproduce 
the entire argument here since it is available in the feature request. 
The relevant functionality in the patch comes in the form of two switches:

-Wshadow-ivars which controls the "local declaration of ‘somevar’ hides 
instance variable" warning which curiously is enabled by default instead 
of being controlled at least by -Wshadow.  The patch changes it so that 
this warning can be enabled and disabled specifically through 
-Wshadow-ivars as well as with all other shadowing-related warnings 
through -Wshadow.

The reason for the extra switch is that, while searching through the 
Internet for a solution to this problem I have found out that other 
people are inconvenienced by this particular warning as well so it might 
be useful to be able to turn it off while keeping all the other 
shadowing-related warnings enabled.

-flocal-ivars which when true, as it is by default, treats instance 
variables as having local scope.  If false (-fno-local-ivars) instance 
variables must always be referred to as self->ivarname and references of 
ivarname resolve to the local or global scope as usual.

I've also taken the opportunity of adding another switch unrelated to 
the above but related to instance variables:

-fivar-visibility which can be set to either private, protected (the 
default), public and package.  This sets the default instance variable 
visibility which normally is implicitly protected.  My use-case for it 
is basically to be able to set it to public and thus effectively disable 
this visibility mechanism altogether which I find no use for and 
therefore have to circumvent.  I'm not sure if anyone else feels the 
same way towards this but I figured it was worth a try.

I'm attaching a preliminary patch against the current revision in case 
anyone wants to have a look.  The changes are very small and any blatant 
mistakes should be immediately obvious.  I have to admit to having 
virtually no knowledge of the internals of GCC but I have tried to keep 
in line with formatting guidelines and general style as well as looking 
up the particulars of the way options are handled in the available 
documentation to avoid blind copy-pasting.  I have also tried to test 
the functionality both in my own (relatively large, or at least not too 
small) project and with small test programs and everything works as 
expected.  Finallly, I tried running the tests too but these fail to 
complete both in the patched and unpatched version, possibly due to the 
way I've configured GCC.

Dimitris