Foreword
Mad-Pascal (MP) is a 32-bit Turbo Pascal compiler for Atari XE/XL. By design, it is compatible with the Free Pascal Compilator (FPC) (the -MDelphi
switch should be active), which means the possibility of obtaining executable code for XE/XL, PC and every other platform for which FPC exists. MP is not a port of FPC; it has been written based on of SUB-Pascal (2009), XD-Pascal (2010), the author of which is Vasiliy Tereshkov.
A program that works on Atari might have problems on PC if, for example, the pointers have not been initialized with the address of a variable and the program attempts to write to the address $0000
(memory protection fault). The strengths of MP include fast and convenient possibility of inclusion of inline assembly. A program using inline ASM does not work on platforms other than XE/XL. MP uses 64KB of primary memory; TMemoryStream
provides usage of extended memory.
Variable allocation is static; there is no dynamic memory management. Parameters are passed to functions by value, variable or constant.
The available features are:
If
Case
For
While
Repeat
statements- Compound statements
Label
Goto
statements- Arithmetic and boolean operators
- Procedures and functions with up to 8 parameters. Returned value of a function is assigned to a predefined
RESULT
variable - Static local variables
- Primitive data types, all types except the
ShortReal
/Real
type are compatible. Pointers are dereferenced as pointers toWord
:Cardinal
Word
Byte
Boolean
String
PChar
Char
Integer
SmallInt
ShortInt
Pointer
File
Text
ShortReal
Real
fixed-point
Float
Single
Float16
- One-dimensional and Two-dimensional arrays (with zero lower bound) of any primitive type. Arrays are treated as pointers to their origins (like in C) and can be passed to subroutines as parameters
- Predefined type string
[N]
which is equivalent toarray [0..N] of Char
Type
aliases.Records
Objects
- Separate program modules
- Recursion
Układ katalogów
In the directory with MP, the presence of relevant files and subdirectories is required:
mp\
mp.exe
base\
rtl_default.asm
rtl6502_a8.asm
rtl6502_c4p.asm
rtl6502_c64.asm
rtl6502_neo.asm
rtl6502_raw.asm
atari\
c4p\
c64\
common\
neo\
raw\
runtime\
lib\
aplib.pas
atari.pas
blowfish.pas
c64.pas
...
src\
targets\
crt.inc
graph.inc
system.inc
Compilation
To compile the sources of Mad-Pascal, one may use Delphi, provided they happen to have installed Delphi 7.0 or a later version.
A more cross-platform way is to use the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC), which can be downloaded from freepascal.org.
Launch the installer and choose the directory for the installation of FP. It is crucial not to use the exclamation mark !
or other nonstandard characters in the directory name. If it fails to compile any file, most probably, it is the fault of a nonstandard pathname. The command-line launching the compilation may look as follows (letter case in parameter names matters):
fpc -Mdelphi -v -O3 mp.pas
-Mdelphi
allows for Delphi format file compilation-v
shows all error and warning diagnostics-O3
performs code optimization