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From: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Various Turbo pascal questions
Keywords: Turbo pascal
Message-ID: <900@maytag.waterloo.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 89 14:09:50 GMT
References: <2185@leah.Albany.Edu> <6972@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: daemon@maytag.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 26

In article <6972@portia.Stanford.EDU> gaia@portia.Stanford.EDU (fai to leung) writes:
>In article <2185@leah.Albany.Edu> ppd491@leah.Albany.Edu (Peter P. Donohue) writes:
>>
>>   I have a few questions pertaining to programming in Turbo Pascal 5.5
>>under the MS-Dos operating system. Any help with these would be
>>appreciated. 
>>
>>  1) In an external data file (containing all ascii data), what is the
>>maximum length of a line allowed? 
>
>I would say 255 characters long.
>Pascal strings format are byte[0]=length of string follow by the ascii chars.

In TP 5.5, there doesn't appear to be a line length limit of 255 characters.
Certainly a single string can only be that length, but a statement like

  readln(string1,string2);

will successfully read lines up to 510 characters long, in two parts, and
  for i:=1 to 100
    read(x[i]);

will successfully read 100 numbers off a line even if the line is much longer
than 255 characters. 

Duncan Murdoch