On 2023-03-27 11:45, Jacob Kroon via fpc-pascal wrote:
Hi,
I have some old Pascal code that was compiled in a CPM environment
using the Pascal/MT+ compiler from Digital Research. I'm trying to get
this project to build in a modern environment, for a start using
FreePascal.
First, is anyone aware of a tool for converting this dialect of Pascal
to something that FreePascal will accept ?
Sorry, no idea.
Second, the old code contains a lot of:
var
foobar : external integer;
in sources that reference 'foobar', then there is a declaration in one
of them:
var
foobar : integer;
As I understand it, in order to translate this to something that
FreePascal understands, the variable needs to go in a "unit" and be
part of its interface. Then, pascal sources that needs to reference
the variable should use this unit. Is this the easiest way forward ?
Yes, most likely.
I thought maybe I instead could adapt the syntax like:
var
foobar : integer; external;
but with this I still get undefined references when linking. Using
units seems ok.
Indeed - while using the keyword 'external' as outlined in your modified
example would be possible (even for importing a variable from another
FPC compiled unit), it's primary purpose is for importing variables
coming from object files compiled using different compilers (e.g. C,
etc.) and there's no reason for using it for variables declared in a FPC
unit in most cases (let's put some special cases aside for now).
Tomas
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