Inno Pascal 0.1.4
Copyright (C) 2000 Jordan Russell
For conditions of distribution and use, see LICENSE.TXT.
Home page: http://www.jrsoftware.org/
Current Inno Pascal home page: http://other.jrsoftware.org/ip/
E-mail: jr @ jrsoftware.org

Miscellaneous notes

Some limitations of existing features:

• The linker currently has a limit of 512 bytes on the code and import data sections. This would not be difficult to fix; I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
• Only supported types are Integer, Cardinal, Longint, LongWord, and PChar. (Actually there are smaller types like Bytes, Words, etc. but they don't work yet; don't use them.)
• Expressions are supported in variable assignments, but they must be surrounded by "expr()". For example: "A := expr(1 + 2 * 3);". Four operators are currently supported: + - * div; parentheses may also be used. Functions may be called inside expressions. The code generated by expressions is far from optimal; every term is pushed and popped from the stack.
• Functions cannot be called inside a function's parameter list, e.g. "MessageBox(0, GetCommandLine, 'Title', MB_ICONQUESTION);". Also, expressions can't currently be used in a function's parameters list either.
• While it supports declaration of local variables, they are actually internally stored as global variables (like "static" variables in C). So don't try recursively calling a procedure yet.
• Non-external procedures can't take parameters yet (since it doesn't have any stack handling support yet).
• stdcall is the only supported calling convention

Important features it's lacking:

• "if"s
• boolean expressions (i.e. A <> B)
• ... and more

Interesting things it already supports:

• Compiler warns about uninitialized and unused variables. (Still needs some work, however. "A := MessageBeep(A)" doesn't warn about A being uninitialized.)
• Compiler automatically removes unused variables, imports, and procedures.
• It supports procedures and nested procedures. Constants, variables, and procedures declared inside a procedure are local only to that procedure.

Credits

Others who have contributed to the project:

• Developers of mwEdit/SynEdit - the excellent syntax highlighting code editor used in the IDE.
• Michael Hieke - improvements to IDE's editor, debugger, and compiler.