[Info-vax] Pascal question

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/21/2019 8:44 PM, John Reagan wrote:
> On Monday, January 21, 2019 at 8:34:32 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 1/21/2019 8:23 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> On 1/21/19 6:56 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>> Actually, while at the risk of wasting your valuable time, I'd ask,
>>>> why would Pascal as implemented by you not already have such a
>>>> function? Understand, I don't use Pascal.  Was string handling not a
>>>> featured part of the language?
>>>
>>> The original Pascal as defined by Niklaus Wirth didn't have
>>> a string type at all.
>>
>> First version of his paper actually had an alfa type that seems
>> very similar to a string.
>>
>> In the 1973 version and forward it was all packed array of char.
> 
> ALFA was a PACKED ARRAY [1..10] OF CHAR.  60-bits to fit in a CDC-6400 register with 6-bit characters.

So that is why the document is worded like "alfa    the values are
sequences of n characters, where n is an implementation dependent
parameter".

I still think it is a string type. It is a non-composite
type containing characters.

But fixed length string of (max) length 10 are admittedly
very limited.

Arne