[Info-vax] Pascal question

[Dave Froble]

On 1/21/2019 4:07 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 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
>

I've had occasion on both RSTS and VMS to work with EBCDIC data.  No 
reason such support should not be present.

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