A macro highlighted as keyword: pascal

While looking in the sample code for FunkyOverlayWindow, I just found a pretty interesting declaration:

pascal OSStatus MyHotKeyHandler(
    EventHandlerCallRef nextHandler,
    EventRef theEvent,
    void *userData
);

Here, pascal is highlighted as a keyword (pink in standard Xcode color scheme). But I just found it's a macro, interestingly enough defined in file CarbonCore/ConditionalMacros.h as:

#define pascal

So, what is (or was) it supposed to do? Maybe it had some special use in the past?

While this discussion might not be well suited开发者_StackOverflow社区 here, it would be interesting to know why Apple still using Carbon if this relates to the answer. I have no experience in Carbon, but this code appears to set a keyboard event handler which makes me wonder if there are any advantages over the Cocoa approach. Won't Carbon be ever removed completely?

Under the 68k Classic Mac OS runtime (e.g, before PowerPC or x86), C and Pascal used different calling conventions, so C applications had to declare the appropriate convention when calling into libraries using the Pascal conventions (including most of the operating system). The macro was implemented in contemporaneous compilers (e.g, MPW, Metrowerks, Think C).

In all newer runtimes, and in all modern compilers, the keyword is no longer recognized, so the ConditionalMacros.h header defines it away. There are a few comments in that file which may help explain a bit more -- read through it, if you're game.

You have encountered a calling convention.

The pascal calling convention for the x86 is described here.

It is very interesting that it was defined-away-to-nothing, which you notice means that it is not used anymore. It was common in the old days in x86-land, especially in the Microsoft Windows APIs, because of the ability of the processor to remove parameters from the stack at the end of a call with its special RET n instruction. Functions with the pascal calling convention were sometimes advantageous, because the caller wasn't explicity adjusting the stack pointer after each call returned.

If someone with more knowledge of why the macro still exists in the codebase, but is defined away comes along and gives you a better answer, I will happily withdraw this one.