Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!ags
From: ags@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Dave Seaman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Strange... The Turbo Pascal NEW command
Message-ID: <3534@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 1 Aug 89 14:54:39 GMT
References: <845@dutrun.UUCP>
Reply-To: ags@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Dave Seaman)
Organization: Purdue University
Lines: 19

In article <845@dutrun.UUCP> winfave@dutrun.UUCP (A.Verbraeck) writes:
>There's one thing about Turbo Pascal that I don't understand,
>and that is the how the New procedure knows the size of the
>block on the heap to be allocated. 

If you really want to do this, you should be using Modula-2 instead of
Pascal.  It has been a while since I looked at this, but the way I remember it
is as follows.  Modula-2 specifies that a call NEW(P) is translated into the
system procedure ALLOCATE(P,n), where n is the size of the object to be
allocated, and is determined by the compiler.  ALLOCATE is imported from the
SYSTEM module.

The Pascal standard does not provide any implementation details for NEW.
Therefore there is no guarantee that what you are asking is even possible in
any given implementation, short of writing assembly code.  There certainly is
no portable way of doing it.
-- 
Dave Seaman	  					
ags@seaman.cc.purdue.edu