Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!buengc!art
From: art@buengc.BU.EDU (A. R. Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Control variables in FOR loops
Message-ID: <1712@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 18 Dec 88 20:30:41 GMT
References: <1439@csuna.UUCP> <169@m2xenix.UUCP>
Reply-To: art@buengc.bu.edu (A. R. Thompson)
Followup-To: comp.lang.pascal
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 21

In article <169@m2xenix.UUCP> randy@m2xenix.UUCP (Randy Bush) writes:
>Conjecture and testing aginst particular implementations (other than ours, of
>course:-) may be amusing, but have little to do with the definition of the
>language.  I recommend the standard itself, accompanied by "Standard Pascal
>User Reference Manual" by Doug Cooper.

Another goodd reference is "Pascal.  User Manual and Report" 3rd ed.
Jensen and Wirth, revised by Mickel and Miner.

>
>The interesting, and unexpected, restriction is that it may not be threatened
>by use within an enclosed procedure/function.  The following is not legal:
>

I'm not quite sure what is so "unexpected" in the restriction that there
may not be an assigning reference to the control variable in a for
statement.  The for statement is intended as a strictly sequential way of
stepping through a succesion of statements (often array references).  If
you want to make assigning references to the control variable in a looping
statement, you should use either a while statement or a repeat statement.
That's what they are for (so to speak).