[Info-vax] Pascal question

[Brian_R]

On Tuesday, January 22, 2019 at 1:44:04 AM UTC, 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.
> > 
> > Arne
> 
> ALFA was a PACKED ARRAY [1..10] OF CHAR.  60-bits to fit in a CDC-6400 register with 6-bit characters.
> 
> Extended Pascal added a variable string STRING() type that is almost identical to our VARYING OF CHAR type (which itself was modeled on PL/1's VARYING OF CHAR).
> 
> As for string manipulation, like upcase, it hasn't been a popular request.

Why would it be, its handled quite nicely by the OS libraries. I use VMS Pascal on a daily basis and we use STR$xxxxx for standard string handling. 

Now additional routines (RTL preferred) for the manipulation of JSON structures might be a plan.