According to Jakob Heinemann:

I read somewhere that GPC actually doesn't pack things in types which are declared as PACKED. Is this true? What about packed array's of char, i.e. non-varying strings?

It is true, but it only affects things which are smaller than one byte or structures containings things which should be aligned on a 2- or 4-byte boundary.

One example:

Type ByteInt = __byte__ Integer; Byte = __unsigned__ ByteInt;

Var AOC: array [ 1..100 ] of Char; PAOC: packed array [ 1..100 ] of Char; AOBoo: array [ 1..100 ] of Boolean; PAOBoo: packed array [ 1..100 ] of Boolean; AOBy: array [ 1..100 ] of Byte; PAOBy: packed array [ 1..100 ] of Byte;

all have 100 bytes (while PAOBoo should have ( 100 + 7 ) div 8 bytes), and

MyRec: record B: Byte; C: Char; I: Integer; end (* MyRec *);

has 8 bytes, not 6.

\begin{sigh} When we say that GPC "does not pack" this means about the same as what Borland means when they claim that Borland Pascal "always packs". The only difference is that Borland Pascal does not care about 32-bit alignment and thus often produces records of smaller size - at the expense of loss of speed. \end{sigh}

Hope this helps,

Peter

Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [970201] maintainer GNU Pascal - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]