Big thanks for your interest. Where do I begin here?

I code Pascal from the text editor "NEdit." With Pascal syntax highlight 
settings and tab space setting of 4 spaces it all reads like a book or 
poem to me. Code blocks are clearly marked by words like Program, uses, 
const, type, var, procedure, function, begin, end, interface, 
implementation, etc. Symbols, labels and names are (mostly) case 
insensitive so can be chosen for readability, instead of looking like a 
password to an online bank account separated by squiggles and stars.

C unions have counterparts in Pascal variant records. All the "feature 
test macros" used (see getconf) in the C library work for a C compiler 
and not Pascal. So C++ really seems best. Freepascal has a utility 
"h2pas" that helps convert headers to pascal. But I'm actually satisfied 
with the posix timer results. The "siginfo" signal handlers are 
non-essential.

I'm now playing with old Unix domain sockets software, and as usual, 
Linux has some new treats. Linux recently added SOCK_SEQPACKET types. 
What relates to this discussion is how some programmers are advocating 
pre-pending a message with a size byte to define message blocks. But 
that is exactly what freepascal does for old strings types. The null 
"terminated" C strings are a hazard.

Standard interprocess communication, with precision intra-process 
events. Far too big a problem for me, but I'm delighted to learn the 
Linux community is equipped for industrial (not just informational) 
applications.

Iznogoud wrote:
>> I got a slimmed down freepascal version of the posix timer example to work;
>>
>> http://www.sytekcom.com/eng/fp_Linux_PosixTimer.html
>>
> I had a good look at what you have created. I was surprised to see that
> Pascal tries to control from within the source the library from which
> specific _external_ functions are picked, for example the timer-related
> calls from "rt" and signal-related calls from the "c" library (librt.so
> and libc.so). That is "strange" enough, controlling from the source what
> objects are linked are the linking step. But I do not really know Pascal
> and its idiosyncrasies.
>
> I will get the freepascal software and try to run it and see what the issue
> is with the unions.
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