[fpc-pascal] History of the Cardinal data type?

[Sven Barth]

Am 30.03.2016 10:37 schrieb "Graeme Geldenhuys" <
mailinglists at geldenhuys.co.uk>:
> > At that time word size might vary dramatically from system to system   (
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture) )
>
> Interesting. I never knew Word was platform dependant. I see even for
> ARMv1, ARMv6 and ARMv8 the size of Word changes.

One needs to differentiate here. In the contexts of CPUs a Word usually
means the native register width. The "Word" in Pascal is merely the name of
a type. While it might have been originally intended to match the CPU's
Word that got lost with Borland's introduction of 32-bit Pascal.

> Does FPC follow that platform rule, or does FPC always define Word as
> 16-bits? [sorry I don't have a ARM device to test on at the moment]
> If Word size does changes in FPC (for example between x86 & ARMv6), then
> I have quite a bit of code to fix up.

Word is 16-bit in FPC.

Regards,
Sven
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