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From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: *\"LDA\" ok?
Message-ID: <564@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 25-Aug-87 07:32:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: sugar.564
Posted: Tue Aug 25 07:32:25 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Aug-87 08:57:19 EDT
References: <8877@brl-adm.ARPA> <8088@mimsy.UUCP> <87@splut.UUCP> <560@sugar.UUCP> <92@splut.UUCP>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 37
Summary: There's no Pascal standard for the things.

In article <92@splut.UUCP>, jay@splut.UUCP (Jay Maynard) writes:
> In article <560@sugar.UUCP>, peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
> > > Because most other languages, and all of the other languages that a
> > > programmer new to C is likely to know, handle strings intrinsically.
> > 
> > Pascal doesn't even have a "variable length packed byte array" type. In
> > fact it *can't* have one unless you extend it. I know you love Turbo,
> > but it ain't Jensen & Wirth compatible.
> 
> Turbo isn't the only Pascal that handles strings...in fact, how many
> strictly-J&W-compatible commercial Pascals do you know of? How many
> non-J&Ws?

I learned Pascal using a J&W compiler. We're talking about "other languages
that a programmer new to 'C' is likely to know" here... not some weird
variant of Pascal that isn't even a proper superset of J&W (as UCSD,
for example, is). Before you come back with some variant of "Turbo is
becoming (or even is) a standard", let me remind you that UCSD once had the
same cachet.

And of course Turbo strings aren't the same as UCSD strings aren't the same
as Pascal/2 strings...

How about Fortran pre-F77?

How about assembler?

How about PL/M?

Also, many of the languages that do have strings don't give you much more than
the equivalent of "strcpy", "strcmp", "strncpy", and so on. For example,
Fortran 77. About the only place you can do more with strings than copying
bytes into preallocated data is in I/O statements. I'll take *printf over
Fortran formatted I/O any day.
-- 
-- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!seismo!soma!uhnix1!sugar!peter
--                  U   <--- not a copyrighted cartoon :->