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12.5 Parameter Passing

GPC supports a lot of funny things in parameter lists: value and reference, protected and const parameters, strings and other schemata with specified or unspecified discriminants, conformant and open arrays, objects, procedural parameters, untyped reference parameters, etc. All this requires sophisticated type-checking; the responsible function is convert_arguments() in the source file typecheck.c. Every detail can be looked up from there.

Some short notes about the most interesting cases follow.

Conformant arrays:
First, the array bounds are passed (an even number of parameters of an ordinal type), then the address(es) of the array(s) themselves.


Procedural parameters:
These need special care because a function passed as a parameter can be confused with a call to the function whose result is then passed as a parameter. See also the functions maybe_call_function() and probably_call_function() in expressions.c.
Chars:
According to ISO 10206 Extended Pascal, formal char parameters accept string values. GPC does the necessary conversion implicitly. The empty string produces a space.


Strings and schemata:
Value parameter strings and schemata of known size are really passed by value. Value parameter strings and schemata of unknown size are passed by reference, and GPC creates temporary variable to hold a copy of the string.
CString parameters:
GPC implicitly converts any string value such that the address of the actual string data is passed and appends a Chr (0) terminator when necessary.


const parameters:
If a constant value is passed to a const parameter, GPC assigns the value to a temporary variable whose address is passed. Exception: Small types (whose size is known and not bigger than that of a pointer) as well as all integer, real and complex types are passed by value.


Untyped parameters:
These are denoted by var foo or var foo: Void and are compatible to C's void * parameters; the size of such entities is not passed. Maybe we will change this in the future and pass the size for var foo parameters whereas var foo: Void will remain compatible to C. (Same with const instead of var.)