Reader Feedback and Insights: More About Strings

Hey, Ted:

The %STR() built-in function supports C-style strings (or "null terminated strings") just as you described ["Variable-Length Character Data"]. The other variable-length string with the VARYING keyword was described perfectly, except, traditionally, this type of value is often referred to as a "Pascal string."

I'm not sure if that term is still widely used, but back when they were implementing Pascal on the System/38, that's what IBMers in Rochester called them. It seemed like the guys at Rochester were the single largest installed base for Borland International's Turbo Pascal compiler. They even had Pascal clubs.  The Turbo Pascal compiler was a key reason why IBM created a Pascal compiler for the System/38.

--Bob Cozzi

That's interesting, Bob. I've never heard the term "Pascal string" before. I learned Pascal on a DEC VAX 11/780, in 1983, and for the next two years I wrote a lot of Pascal on the VAX and the Harris H800. I don't remember about the Harris compiler, but VAX Pascal supported a "varying of character" data type. I understand that Niklaus Wirth, who invented Pascal, implemented strings as arrays of characters. It was also my understanding that the Pascal compiler writers, especially Borland, added the string type. I wrote even more Pascal using Turbo Pascal on 8088 machines, and found support for strings very helpful.

The only other language I knew of back in those days that implemented what you call Pascal strings was BASIC, in particular IBM's BASICA interpreter and its twin, GW-BASIC, so I have always called them "BASIC strings."

--Ted

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