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From: heidi@ucthpx.uct.ac.za (Heidi de Wet)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal,comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Variable alignment in Unix Pascal
Message-ID: <1991Apr16.074827.8954@ucthpx.uct.ac.za>
Date: 16 Apr 91 07:48:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: ucthpx.1991Apr16.074827.8954
Organization: Dept of Elec Eng, UCT
Lines: 22


I am involved in a project porting a large Pascal application from
an 8086-based system to Interactive Unix on a 386.  One of the 
requirements of the project is binary-level compatibility of files.

The original software was written in Intel's Pascal-86, which uses 
byte-alignment for all data types.  Unfortunately, our Unix Pascal 
compiler (LPI) uses 16-bit alignment only.  This makes it extremely 
difficult to access our files, which use complicated variant records.

I see the C compiler on our system supports options for specifying 
packing boundaries: -Zp[1|2|4] and #pragma pack.  Does anyone know 
of a Unix Pascal compiler which supports similar options?  Apart from
this, we only need support of ISO standard Pascal plus separate
compilation.

In desperation,
Heidi
-- 
Heidi de Wet
heidi@ucthpx.uct.ac.za
University of Cape Town, South Africa