[fpc-devel]Bugs in setlength for multidimensional dynamic arrays: first partial fix

[Michael.VanCanneyt at Wisa.be]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Pavel V. Ozerski wrote:

> Hello, I try to understand the way of working of setlength.
>
> 1)
> A question: why tdynarraytypeinfo structure is so strange?
>
>    tdynarraytypeinfo = packed record
>       kind : byte;
>       namelen : byte;
>       { here the chars follow, we've to skip them }
>       elesize : t_size;
>       eletype : pdynarraytypeinfo;
>    end;
>
> If it is made so not for, e.g. Delphi compatibility, may be, that would be better, to reorder fileds in it to move
> variable-length part to end of structure. This change could avoid strange and dangerous pointer operations to get
> .elesize and .eletype values

The type is declared like that exactly for Delphi compatibility; The RTTI
information is stored like that.


>  Example:
>
>    tdynarraytypeinfo = packed record
>       kind : byte;
>       elesize : t_size;
>       eletype : pdynarraytypeinfo;
>       case integer of
>        0:(namelen:byte);
>        1:(name:string[255]);
>    end;
>
> 2) but what is a mean, to include type names into executable? I think, for most cases the information about element size is enough.

This is needed for Run-Time Type Information - for streaming.

Michael.