Turbo Pascal generates jumps in an interesting way. Since most jumps will jump to the same place, Turbo Pascal keeps them in a linked list.

Turbo Pascal tries to convert all near jumps to short. This is only possible if jump displacement can be stored in a byte. This procedure is called just before the target code is generated. Since all changes reduce code size and therefore provide new opportunities for optimizations, the function is called in a loop until …