[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[John Reagan]

"JF Mezei" <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote in message 
news:0083cc77$0$30078$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com...
> Re: C and buffer overflows.
>
> Is there a language which keeps 2 values for each string: amount
> allocated and amount currently in use ?

Pascal (well, Extended Pascal, but OpenVMS Pascal has that from the EP 
standard).

The predeclared STRING type will take a run-time expression for the maximum 
capacity.  You can get the current length with LENGTH() and you can get the 
max capacity with the ".CAPACITY" descriminant.

Underneath, we use a leading length word on the string so you are limited to 
64K characters.  For ease of implementation, we use a longword at run-time 
to keep the CAPACITY, but check that it doesn't exceed 64K.

Note this is more flexible than the VARYING OF CHAR in OpenVMS Pascal 
(stolen from PL/I) which only allows compile-time expressions as the maximum 
length.

John