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From: abcscnuk@csuna.csun.edu (Naoto Kimura)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Strange... The Turbo Pascal NEW command
Message-ID: <2110@csuna.csun.edu>
Date: 1 Aug 89 20:50:52 GMT
References: <845@dutrun.UUCP> <3534@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: abcscnuk@csuna.csun.edu (Naoto Kimura)
Organization: CSU Northridge
Lines: 25

In article <3534@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> ags@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Dave Seaman) writes:
>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. 
> ... (text deleted) ...
>
>Dave Seaman	  					
>ags@seaman.cc.purdue.edu

As far as I can guess, it performs a GetMem with the proper size, which
is the size of the type that the pointer to points to.  That is, if the
pointer variable passed to New is a pointer to a record, it allocates
enough memory to store that record type.  It knows the size because it
knows the record type and the size (as given by the SizeOf function).
I haven't tried to send a Pointer type (just pointer, not a pointer to
anything in particular) into New to see how much it allocates.  It's
really annoying that I can't allocate a 64K block (I can only allocate
64K - 1 byte).

                //-n-\\			 Naoto Kimura
        _____---=======---_____		 (abcscnuk@csuna.csun.edu)
    ====____\   /.. ..\   /____====
  //         ---\__O__/---         \\	Enterprise... Surrender or we'll
  \_\                             /_/	send back your *&^$% tribbles !!