Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!tektronix!percival!parsely!agora!ihf1!bobd
From: bobd@ihf1.UUCP (Bob Dietrich)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: function returning a record?
Message-ID: <553@ihf1.UUCP>
Date: 3 Mar 89 20:00:54 GMT
References: <2012@pur-phy> <790@rpi.edu> <2016@pur-phy>
Reply-To: bobd@ihf1.UUCP (Bob Dietrich)
Organization: Intel Corp., Hillsboro, Oregon
Lines: 27

In article <2016@pur-phy> murphy@newton.physics.purdue.edu.UUCP (William J. Murphy) writes:
>                                [...]    The error message for this problem
>correctly points out that you cannot declare a function as returning
>anything other than simple types and pointers.
>
>In light of the conversation in this group a few weeks ago about splitting
>the group into PC/Turbo Pascal and others, I wished to get an answer
>to this question (above) in the broader scope of knowledge about Pascal.
>The only Pascal compiler I use is Turbo Pascal.
>
>Bill Murphy
>murphy@newton.physics.purdue.edu

In standard Pascal the statement above is correct: you can only define
functions to return simple types (integer, char, real, Boolean, subranges,
enumerations) and pointers. To some degree, this was done to keep
implementation of the language simple; it was also influenced by the fact for
the first implementation of Pascal (CDC 6000 series), all these quantities
fit in one 60-bit word.

Draft Proposed Extended Pascal relaxes this restriction, and allows anything
except files. Thus you can now have functions returning complex (which, BTW,
is a simple type!), arrays, records, or sets.

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