Hello,

today I saw this kind of character escaping:
var
  a :char;
begin
  a:=^M; // char(13)
  writeln(^X);  // char(24)
end;

The code of the character is derived as ord(letter)-ord('A')+1 Not sure which pascal its inherited from... but Delphi 7 does compile it too.

I vaguely remember it seeing before once .. and ... a lot of time ago.

Should it be added to this page:
http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refse8.html#x20-190001.8 ? (need a bug report created?) or is it documented somewhere else?

CodeTools syntax highlighter won't recognize the syntax as characters either (delphi 7 highlighter doesn't recognize it as a character escaping as well)

thanks,
Dmitry

hmm.. the character escaping is somewhat tricky.
The following code compiles:
writeln(^_^));

thanks,
Dmitry

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 8:17 AM, Dmitry Boyarintsev <

2015-01-19 14:17 GMT+01:00 Dmitry Boyarintsev :

IIRC good old Turbo Pascal had this too.

Dmitry Boyarintsev wrote

Not sure which pascal its inherited from... but Delphi 7 does compile it too.

It was certainly a feature of the first TurboPascal, and perhaps was in even earlier Pascal compilers, enabling simple insertion of control characters from the keyboard.
Later superseded by the "control string" syntax (#nnn) which gave access to all 8-bit ASCII values, it was retained by Borland for backwards compatibility reasons. A complication for parsers since "^" has other meanings of far more significance in most Pascal code.

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Should it be added to this page:

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refse8.html#x20-190001.8 ? (need a bug report created?) or is it documented somewhere else?

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu7.html

FYI: Codetools do not have a syntax highlighter. In Lazarus the highligher of synedit (TSynPasSyn) is used.

Codetools should parse it correctly.

Mattias

leledumbo wrote

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu7.html

The beginning of the section. Shame on me.
"The compiler is rather sloppy about the characters it allows after the caret, but in general one should assume only letters"

, characters are interpreted as following:
 '^' :
 begin
   readchar;
   c:=upcase(c);
   if c<#64 then
     c:=chr(ord(c)+64)
   else
     c:=chr(ord(c)-64);
  ...

thanks,
Dmitry

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 11:05 AM, Mattias Gaertner <

I was hoping to hear that. I had some concerns about it at the time I was looking at SynEdit's code and saw a lot of {$ifdef lazarus}. SynPas doesn't recognize the expression as a character, but I can't say that's a big issue :)

thanks,
Dmitry

Add that to the bugtracker please (as synedit HL issue).

It is probably easy to fix, simple a question of not forgetting it