Is IP Pascal compatible with Extended Pascal ?
A. It was a hard decision not to follow along with extended Pascal. IP Pascal and extended Pascal are simply not oriented towards the same goal. With IP, I wanted maximum code efficiency and maximum programmer control over generated code. The features in extended Pascal, notably “schemas” were designed to have the processor work harder in exchange for programmer convienence. That’s certainly one methodology, but schemas have overall effects on generated code efficiency, and I felt that IP Pascal could not meet my goal of being more efficient than most existing C compilers and still implement schemas. Introducing variable length arrays into Pascal is a difficult proposition. Because any such scheme must interchange data types with the fixed length arrays of unextended Pascal, it is hard not to end up with a system that adds extra fields and handling to all arrays even if they are not variable length. After a careful analysis of schemas, I came to the conclusion that the system indeed ha
