[fpc-pascal]Another pointer related question

[Peter Vreman]

> > Dispose is supposed to free the whole memory block pointed by the
> > pointer, so it has to know exactly what structure it references to
> > (otherwise it wouldn't know how many bytes were occupied originally).
> > Consequently, it cannot be used with a generic pointer parameter,
> > only with some actual, typed one.
>
> I was afraid it was going to be something like that. I had hoped that by
> merely referencing the pointer I could just reclaim all the memory it was
> using, regardless of the structure. Sigh...

Getmem(p,20000);

Freemem(p);

works fine. The heap manager knows about the size of each allocation and
can therefor free the correct amount of memory. The following code will
even give a runtime error:

Getmem(p,20000);

Freemem(p,30000);