On 13 jun 2007, at 07:26, Contestcen@aol.com wrote:
That's precisely the point. The Borland, TMT, FPC and GPC compilers are not compatible on bit-packing. By using the Macro Compiler you get bit- packing which is independent of the compiler, so that programs compiled with any of these Pascal compilers can exchange data.
The bitpacking format is defined in the ABI of the respective platforms (at least all SYSV processor-specific supplements define how you should bitpack), and gcc follows that ABI.
Some documentation: * http://www.sco.com/developers/devspecs/abi386-4.pdf : i386 sysv abi supplement, see p. 3-6 and following (look, SCO is still useful for something after all :) * http://refspecs.freestandards.org/elf/elfspec_ppc.pdf : ppc sysv abi supplement, see p. 3-8 and following
Jonas
Let me see if I follow this. You posted to this forum because you were having problems with bit-packing. You said that you wanted bit-packing that would allow data exchange between programs that were compiled with different compilers, and perhaps ran on different platforms. The Pascal Macro Compiler could make that possible.
Now you say that there are standards for bit-packing, and that the GCC compiler follows the standards. Apparently the other Pascal compilers don't follow the standard. (So far as I know, the Borland and TMT compilers don't do bit-packing at all.) Also, the standard does not seem to work across multiple platforms because of different unit sizes.
But you still won't use the Pascal Macro Compiler because it solves the bit-packing problem by a means other than enforcing the bit-packing standard on all Pascal compilers. Does that sum it up?
Frank
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