[Info-vax] Pascal question

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 1/21/19 3:39 PM, John Reagan wrote:
> On Monday, January 21, 2019 at 2:47:51 PM UTC-5, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 1/21/19 1:07 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 1/21/2019 12:00 PM, John Reagan wrote:
>>>> On Monday, January 21, 2019 at 11:40:02 AM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>> On 1/21/2019 11:19 AM, Emilio Moreno wrote:
>>>>>> Here is another one. upcase
>>>>>
>>>>> Weird. I don't seem to be able to find anything better
>>>>> than:
>>>
>>>> str$upcase is about the best you'll get from Pascal.
>>>
>>> Maybe it was time to add 25-50 convenience functions to
>>> VMS Pascal?
>>>
>>> People expect more today. And adding them would show some
>>> progress. And the effort should not be that big aka low hanging
>>> fruit.
>>
>> Maybe it's just me but that's trivial to write a function
>> for in Pascal.  It was one of the common student assignments
>> back when Pascal was the introductory language for the CS
>> Course of study.
>>
>> bill
> 
> It is much harder than you think if you want to stick to standard Pascal ISO7185.  No array initializers and you cannot assume "array ['a'..'z'] of char" is even 26 bytes in length.  You can loop over the array and compare to see if it falls between 'a' and 'z' and update, but don't forget that EBCDIC has other characters in that range.  Extended Pascal's 'index' and 'substr' make it much easier.
> 

I thought we were talking VMS here.  EBCDIC?

bill