[fpc-devel]Q about FP additional questions

[Marco van de Voort]

> I spent an hour getting all the files I could need form your site a
> while back.
> 
> Note that I knew absolutely nothing about Pascal before last night,
> and only been involved minutely in Visual Basic development and
> web site design since April of this year.

Then I suggest some tutorials. E.g. searching on "Glenn Grotzinger" will
certainly find one.

> It writes in average, on my puter, 8,22 Mb per seconds, so needless
> to say I am very pleased in comparance to VB which would take a
> few minutes just to run the generation loop.

Welcome to compiled langauges :- )
 
> Now I must also give you guys a serious patt on the back for really
> knowing what you are doing as far as building an excellent installer
> for the Windows environment.
> 
> I have not had to tweak or alter a single thing before I could compile
> my program.
> (as opposed of DJGPP whihc didnt want to work after 6 hours of install
> attempts,
> or even so, Visual Cpp that still tosses all sorts of weird outcommented
> code into
> the generated applications.)

Pretty close to the reason why I ended up with FPC. Couldn't get GPC
compiled, and the binaries were so _very_ outdated. But that is all ancient
history now :-)
 
> So finaly to my questions.
> 
> 1) Is there a simple way to do
>     Char 2 Ascii Code ('A' => #65)

writeln(ord('A'))


>     Char 2 Hex Code (#255 => $FF)

begin
 writeln(hexstr(longint('A'),2));
end.

>     Char 2 Binary Code (#255 => %11111111)
>     in this kind of reversed conversion, already included
>     or is that only possible the opposit way.


begin
 writeln(binstr(ord('A'),8));
end.
 
> 2) Is there an upper limit for how large a file the compiler can
> process?

That is hard to say. There is no exact limit probably, but the compiler
needs more memory to store the already compiled parts, then with seperate (or
divided in units) parts.  
However I don't think there is a limit below several megabytes.

>     I mean I could virtually write all my source code into one single
> text file,
>     and run it as is through the compiler.

You could yes, but you would loose overview probably.

Several MBs must be possible I think, with an average amount of memory by
todays standards.
 
> and perhaps most importantly,
> 
> 3) Is there a way to write DLL files with FreePascal,
>     or can I call the executables in some way to perform the same
> operations?

It's possible with the Win32 version, and IIRC there are examples in the
examples/demo section.
 
> Keep up the good work all of you, and I really hope you decide to
> make all your libraries ported to suit all operating systems.
> 
> I find it amazing, how quickly I picke dup on your excellent writing
> and the wonderful samples you include in the node files in your
> documentation.

The documentation is really good. We have to thank Michael for that.