Peter N Lewis wrote:
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So basically, I'm just saying that the lack of short strings is seriously hindering GPC adoption on the Mac, and that that should probably be taken in to account when pondering the priority of their implementation.
You should be using the standard functions for access to the length parameter, after which you don't care how strings are implemented. The so-called short strings are implementable as records if compatibility with existing binaries or files is required.
One of the major points of Pascal is simply to eliminate machine dependence, and rely on abstractions. Thus integers are fully described by maxint, and smaller ranges should be typed as subranges, etc.