what is FAR PASCAL?

Question

I was wondering why in some source code there are these macros like FAR and PASCAL. What do they mean and do?

Answer 1

this is an old calling convention...

FAR is inherited from a time when processor registers where too small to hold the complete address of a jump destination. so, processors had 2 type of jump depending how "far" the destination was from the current program counter.

PASCAL describes the argument order on the stack, it tells that the function uses the order described by the Pascal programming language, which was different from C. (very old version of operating systems like MacOS and Windows where developped using Pascal).