1. It is passed by value and not by reference.
2. You don't know the size of the value.
3. It is delphi compatible

Peter

I see this change is intentional, but I don't understand it completely yet.

1. It is passed by value and not by reference.

The compile could decide to pass by reference, couldn't it.

2. You don't know the size of the value.

The caller knows the size, doesn't it. Why do you need to know the size?

3. It is delphi compatible

At last, one reason I understand :-).

Thanks,
Vincent

That's what it did in the past, but that's a hack (because it's passing a value without an address by reference).

> 2. You don't know the size of the value. The caller knows the size, doesn't it.

No, it doesn't. Ordinal constants have no inherent size in Pascal (well, in case of TP/Delphi and therefore FPC: most of the time, at least).

Why do you need to know the size?

E.g. on big endian, the memory layout of byte(1), word(1), cardinal(1) and qword(1) is completely different.

Jonas