type Cardinal { built-in type }
Cardinal
is the “natural” unsigned integer type in GNU
Pascal. On some platforms it is 32 bits wide and thus has a range of
0 .. 4294967295
. Use it whenever you need a general-purpose
unsigned integer type and don't need to care about compatibility to
other Pascal dialects.
There are lots of other integer types in GPC, see Integer Types.
Cardinal
is not defined in ISO Pascal, but several Pascal
compilers support it as an extension. In Borland Delphi, for
instance, it is an unsigned 16-bit in version 1.0, an unsigned
31-bit integer from version 2.0 on, and an unsigned 32-bit
integer from version 4.0 on.
program CardinalDemo; var a: Cardinal; begin a := 42; WriteLn (a) end.