Pascal utility library

This contains a general purpose pascal library coded by us for different purposes. All these utilities are freeware or free software and come under no guarantee whatsoever.

Common units

• Generic common code for porting source on different pascal compilers. Currently supported compilers are Virtual Pascal, Delphi, Kylix, Free Pascal and Turbo Pascal. This includes objects, dos and strings units for Delphi.

• Generic unicode handling routines, defined as pascal strings (ucs2string, ucs4string). Handling routines for these strings types as well as their null terminated counterparts. Also includes conversion to/from other string types are present.

• Generic routines related to standards such as ISO 8601 date-time routines, ISO 639 language codes and ISO 3166 country codes.

Standard types

Standard type definitions are a real mess between compiler versions, so these different units try to clean up the entire type mess and defines (or redefines some standard types), so that they are common across compilers. The following portable types are defined:

• Integer: The integer type is the base signed type that is optimized for the underlying machine architecture. So if the base machine architecture is 16-bit this value will be a signed 16-bit value. This is the type that should be used for counters, and internal variables.

• Cardinal: The cardinal type is the base unsigned type that is optimized for the underlying machine architecture. So if the base machine architecture is 16-bit this value will be an unsigned 16-bit value.

• Shortstring: This represents a string type composed of bytes followed preceded by a length byte. This is equivalent to the old string[255] or string type of Turbo Pascal.

• big_integer_t: The biggest integer size available for the compiler (usually equal to longint or int64)

• ptrint : This is the type to use when declaring an ordinal value that will be used to store the value of a pointer (typecasting between to/from a pointer to an ordinal).

The following defines the pre-defined types that have specific sizes and which are available on all supported compilers (some are defined by the compiler, others are defined by one of the units herein):

• byte (0..255)
• shortint (-128..127)
• word (0..65535)
• smallint (-32768..32767)
• longword (0..4294967295) [not supported on all compilers, emulated by longint]
• longint (-2147483648..2147483647)

Standard constants

These constants are used to represent information related to the operating system. They should be used instead of hard coding file system information. This will make the code more portable.

• LineEnding: String indicating the characters ending a text line in a text file.

• DirectorySeparator: This is the character or characters that separate the directories in a complete path specification.

• DriveSeparator : This is the character or characters that separate the directories from the drive specification in a complete path specification.

• PathSeparator: This is the character or characters that separate the directories from the drive specification in a complete path specification.

• FileNameCaseSensitive: This indicates if the filenames are case senstivie or not (this is a boolean value)

Defines

These are the defines that should be used to make your code more portable, they should be defined while compiling as they are used within these units, as well as help making the code clearer (most of these defines are supported by Freepascal);

• ENDIAN_LITTLE if the target is a little endian machine and the compiler is vp,bp,tp,delphi or kylix. ENDIAN_BIG if the target is a big endian machine.

• TP if the compiler is Borland Pascal or Turbo Pascal

• CPU32 if the target is a 32-bit compiler; this is true for Turbo Pascal, Virtual Pascal, Kylix, Delphi and most versions of Freepascal. Otherwise define CPU64.

Changes