[Lazarus] Compilation aborted!

[Donald Ziesig]

On 02/18/2018 04:02 AM, Mattias Gaertner via Lazarus wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 22:35:17 -0500
> Donald Ziesig via Lazarus <lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> Isolated it to FPC.  Ran fpc from terminal without IDE.  Got same error
>> (AV).  It is getting late here. I will look at this in the morning.
> Maybe you got messed up ppu files, or you messed up unit paths.
>
> Mattias

I found the problem!  It is definitely a compiler bug (compiler did NOT 
report the actual error, all it did was throw an Access Violation).

Unfortunately, I had changed one more line than I remembered during the 
last edit before the failure.

That line was (in the type(s) declaration:

     TAMBytes = array[0..1] of Byte;

I changed it to:

   TAMBytes = array[0..High(Integer)] of Byte;

Type TAMBytes was used as the return type is several functions. When I 
commented out ALL of the code that used TAMBytes, the error went away.  
Since TAMBytes was the only consistent item in that code, I checked its 
declaration and remembered the other :-[ change I made. Reverted that to 
the original version and the compilation succeeded.  Finally changed it to:

   TAMBytes = array[0..32767] of Byte;

This also compiled successfully, and was big enough that it will handle 
much bigger arrays than I expected to use.

I will create a simplified test case and submit a bug report to Free Pascal.

Thanks for putting up with my earlier complaints.

Don Ziesig