4 ms·

Why no c header files? I was writing against DirectDraw and DirectSound in that time frame using C, so I'm assuming that there were headers. Or did you just not

by pacaro 10y ago

Why no c header files? I was writing against DirectDraw and DirectSound in that time frame using C, so I'm assuming that there were headers. Or did you just not have access to the windows SDK?

lobster_johnson 10y ago
We had the C header files, but Turbo/Borland Pascal could not read them, it being a different language and all. You had to translate them into Pascal and declare each imported function as something like: function DirectDrawCreate(...): HRESULT; stdcall; external 'ddraw.dll';
- clouddrover 10y ago
  Rudy Velthuis has a great article on the problems commonly encountered when converting C headers to Pascal (or more specifically Delphi): http://rvelthuis.de/articles/articles-convert.html http://rvelthuis.de/articles/articles-convert.html
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Yep. As I said in a previous comment, I actually released a tool, called htrans, to do this, which worked very well for a lot of people. It was a hand-coded C parser with support for a minimal subset of C++ concepts, needed to successfully translate COM interfaces. It had a bunch of kludges specifically to recognize COM. Handling macros was without doubt the most painful part of it, because I couldn't just run the .h file through a preprocessor; I had to also preserve the macros and try to convert them into declarations, so that "#define FOO 1" would result in "const FOO: Integer = 1;" or whatever. Not too bad with simple things, but sometimes people will abuse macros to declare functions... htrans worked well enough that I could run it on a bunch of stuff and not need to edit the resulting .pas files at all. Unfortunately, I suspect I've lost the source code.
- pacaro 10y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. All of this not being helped by the weird macros COM headers used to work in both C and C++ I'm not sure whether I have nostalgia for that time or Stockholm syndrome

by pacaro 10y ago

Why no c header files? I was writing against DirectDraw and DirectSound in that time frame using C, so I'm assuming that there were headers. Or did you just not have access to the windows SDK?

lobster_johnson 10y ago

We had the C header files, but Turbo/Borland Pascal could not read them, it being a different language and all. You had to translate them into Pascal and declare each imported function as something like: function DirectDrawCreate(...): HRESULT; stdcall; external 'ddraw.dll';

clouddrover 10y ago
Rudy Velthuis has a great article on the problems commonly encountered when converting C headers to Pascal (or more specifically Delphi): http://rvelthuis.de/articles/articles-convert.html http://rvelthuis.de/articles/articles-convert.html
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Yep. As I said in a previous comment, I actually released a tool, called htrans, to do this, which worked very well for a lot of people. It was a hand-coded C parser with support for a minimal subset of C++ concepts, needed to successfully translate COM interfaces. It had a bunch of kludges specifically to recognize COM. Handling macros was without doubt the most painful part of it, because I couldn't just run the .h file through a preprocessor; I had to also preserve the macros and try to convert them into declarations, so that "#define FOO 1" would result in "const FOO: Integer = 1;" or whatever. Not too bad with simple things, but sometimes people will abuse macros to declare functions... htrans worked well enough that I could run it on a bunch of stuff and not need to edit the resulting .pas files at all. Unfortunately, I suspect I've lost the source code.
pacaro 10y ago
Thanks for the clarification. All of this not being helped by the weird macros COM headers used to work in both C and C++ I'm not sure whether I have nostalgia for that time or Stockholm syndrome