Delphi Compiler Directive to Evaluate Arguments in Reverse

Question

I was really impressed with this delphi two liner using the IFThen function from Math.pas. However, it evaluates the DB.ReturnFieldI first, which is unfortunate because I n

Answer 1

AFAIK there is no compiler directive to control this. Unless you use the stdcall/cdecl/safecall conventions, parameters are passed left to right on the stack, but because the default register convention can pass parameters in the registers as well, it could happen that a parameter is calculated later an put in a register just before the call. And because only the register order is fixed (EAX, EDX, ECX) for parameters that qualify, registers can be loaded in any order. You could try to force a "pascal" calling convention (you'd need to rewrite the function, anyway) but IMHO is always dangerous to rely on such kind of code, if the compiler can't explicitly guarantee the order of evaluation. And imposing an evaluation order may greatly reduce the number of optimizations available.