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A comment on Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler. Parent comment

Re:Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler by shdon on Friday September 11, 2015 @07:55AM (#10203146)
According to the author, it is not just a subset and actually produces the same binary files as actual TP would (with the exception of debug info). I can't currently verify that claim, but here's what he says on the downloads page:

"It can compile any source code compatible with Turbo Pascal 7 syntax. It will generate the same executable file and unit files as the original Borland compiler."

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Re:Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler by samuell on Friday September 11, 2015 @08:40AM (#10203299)
To me, FreePascal, with its upcoming 3.0 release, is much more interesting.

Interestingly, in 3.0, it will support compiling JVM byte code. [1]

[1] http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_...

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Re:Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler by barrkel on Friday September 11, 2015 @08:28AM (#10203246)
It's unlikely to be 100% bug compatible with TP 7. There are various obscure bits in most languages that have been around for a while, where the implementation choices are a bit arbitrary and interaction between different features can turn up unexpected behaviour.

Turbo Pascal was a much smaller language than what Delphi became, so I can't point you out examples off the top of my head. If I were looking into compatibility issues, I'd play around with things like alignment and packing rules, TP's various hacks to get around Standard Pascal's fixed length strings (e.g. OpenString {$P+}), etc.

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