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Sure. You can use the ISO 7185 "level 0" Pascal with the following omissions:
1. Do not use procedure or function parameters. These have different syntax in ISO 7185 and Delphi.
2. Do not use intraprocedural gotos (gotos that leave the current procedure or function). If you need a deep nested bailout to a higher level procedure, try setting an error variable and checking that after each procedure/function call that might have an error, then skipping either out of the routine, or to the goto point.
3. Do not use file buffer handling (such as f^ accesses, where f is a file), nor the built in routines "get" and "put". Basically, this just means you cannot use the lookahead buffering that ISO 7185 Pascal provides.
4. Do not size your variant records with "new". Delphi knows about variant records, but not how to size them (at least not the standard way). This will have no functional effect on your program, it will just take more runtime space.
5. Always use the keyword "packed" on a string that is intended to be printed with "writeln". Delphi does not require this, but ISO 7185 does.
6. Always include the files "input" and/or "output" in the program header if they are used in the program (and remember that write/read with no file parameter is a defacto reference). Delphi simply ignores these header parameters, so they don't hurt.
7. Always use format specifications to set the width that will be output for integers. This will remove differences from varying default fields.
8. Don't use external files other than input and output, since most Delphi does nothing with header files).
9. Borland Delphi has the requirement that an
{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}
must exist at the top after the program header. If your non-Delphi compiler ignores this as a comment, then you can add it to also be compatible with Delphi. If your ISO 7185 compiler also treats "$" in a comment as an option, you are going to have to be prepared to remove it as need be.
Finally, note that you MUST also comply with the ISO 7185 standard requirements for this to work. For example, ISO 7185 forbids gotos into program structures like "for" loops, etc, whereas delphi does not. There are many other such restrictions of ISO 7185 that are relaxed in Delphi, not to mention the many Delphi extensions that you need to refrain from using (of course, all Pascal compilers have extensions, so that would apply to them as well). Also remember: Pascal originally had no "string" type. This might seem strange, but C (for example) does not have one either. Instead, you use an array of characters (which is not the same thing!). See other sections of this FAQ.
The old bit of cross compiler checking that applies here is to run a check compile on all of the different compilers you plan to be compatible with frequently. This will tell you about problems with different compilers before they get out of hand.
For this author's point of view, I lived with mutiple Pascal compilers for years, and made it work by isolating system specific code to modules that implemented that on a particular platform. For example, I had a set of routines in a module I called "basicio.pas" that contained things like opentext(f, filename), closetext(f) and similar functions. Then, this module is simply recoded or swapped out to move to a different compiler.
