Contestcen@aol.com wrote:
NO, YOU, DON'T!
People have been telling you this all the time, why don't you listen? THIS DOES WORK IN BP:
program foo; const ch: array[1..100] of char = 'When in'; begin end.
(It doesn't work with 1000 indeed, as BP has a string length limitation of 255, but that's just a BP quirk.)
That's very nice. However, please recall that I said the main reason for using a character array instead of a string is because I needed more than 255 characters. So, having a better way to initialize a character array of up to 255 characters doesn't help me. If I only wanted 255 characters I would have used a string in the first place.
You may call this "just a BP quirk" but when you are using BP, or when you want to be compatible with BP it is not a "quirk" it is a real limitation. I have to assume that some of the users of the Pascal Macro Compiler will be using BP, regardless of whatever else exists.
You've moved this discussion from private mail to the GPC list. I don't really mind, but arguing for a solution to a problem that BP has and GPC doesn't, on the GPC list, seems a bit off-topic here. Well, it would have been OT in private mail as well, since I'm not using BP anymore. So you might want to post in c.l.p.b or other Borland forums where this might be relevant.
And when you do so, you might want to state the problems you're trying to solve from the start. For several mails, as well as posts in the newsgroups, you just talked about initializing character arrays, which simply isn't a problem in general. If you've made it clear that you were talking about character arrays > 255 chars in BP, where you hit a compiler limit, readers such as Scott, Chuck and me would have known what you were talking about. (And probably ignored you since we're not affected by those problems.)
Frank