[net.micro.mac] "Inside Macintosh" and pascal

ech@spuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath) (03/20/85)

Chuqui needs to know "a lot of pascal".  There is a (usually reliable)
shortcut: break out the Inside Mac section on assembler programming: it
gives the datatype equivalents for the various datatypes used throughout
the rest of the manual, and also discusses the pascal calling conventions.
Caveats:
	- all structures >= 4 bytes in length are passed by pointer.
	  that's why all the sumacc calls use unary & a lot...
	- booleans are claimed to be 16-bit quantities.  That turns out
	  to be UNTRUE in certain structures, notably the File system
	  structures.
	- the biggest hassle I have found with using C for the mac (I use
	  sumacc) is the different string representations.  This has
	  burned me a LOT.  One tip for sumacc users (and maybe others):
	  whenever you pass a string pointer that is supposed to receive
	  a result, make sure the first byte pointed to is initialized to '\0';
	  it may not be necessary all the time, but it can't hurt and failing
	  to do this is a rich source of "bombs".

=Ned=