Contestcen@aol.com wrote:
The subject of this thread in the GPC mailing list is how to storecharacter strings without wasted space. Notive that the subject of this thread is "Packing strings ()" That was the subject of the original posting that started the thread.
I have mentioned the Pascal Macro Compiler because it comes with macrosthat have the ability to pack strings without wasted space. That is the original question,
Not again please!!! Peter himself made it explicitly clear that he asked for runtime storage (which was clear to all of us except you from the beginning).
I have gone to great lengths to avoid creating any HTML in my postingsto this mailing list. To avoid HTML-style quoting, I am copying the postings myself, and inserting all of those greater-than signs by hand.
As I said, why are you making things so complicated? Use a proper mailer, and you'll neither have to do qouting by hand, nor inadvertently send HTML.
I have tried to stick to the subject, but other people have beenattacking my postings for all sorts of reasons that I believe are tangential at best, such as the use of text compression, hashing, trees and linked lists. I have tried to point out that these are separate issues, but I get attacked again when I do that.
Because you don't seem to realize that your answer about compile-time storage is, at best, tangential to the original question. And again, most people apparently are more interested in efficient access than minor(!) space savings. You might care for the latter at the cost o99f the former, but why do you keep posting about it if nobody else here shares this preference. Use it for yourself and be happy with it, but don't bother others who don't like it. We're well aware that this is possible, one way or the other, but apparently noone here wants to do that.
I am starting to wonder if this isn't some kind of hazing for the newguy, and if I want to join this fraternity then I have to undergo this ritual. Or maybe you are just testing me to see if I am worthy to be in this august company.
Really not. Unfortunately, the main archives are still offline (but you might be able to find mirrors through Google). There you'll see that few, if anyone, had so many initial problems. Some did an HTML posting or strange quoting in their initial mail, but after a friendly reminder, they changed it. You're probably the first one who seems to need a majority vote of all list subscribers to convince you (would 2/3 of all who ever posted to the list be enough for you, counting abstentions as negative votes? ;-), and constantly ignores all pointers to standard netiquette (including numerous ones in private mail, I must add).
PS:
If you need to initialize a character array greater than 255 chars in BP, you can resort to using absolute. For example Const ch1: array[1..5,1..100] of char = ('First 100 chars', 'Second 100 chars', ..., 'Last 100 chars'); Var ch: array[1..500] of char absolute ch1;
That's really non-portable, a BP *only* solution (if at all). If the compiler aligns the sub-arrays, it can break. Since BP is finished, you could check all versions and make sure it works on all of them, but on other compilers, it's a recipe for suicide. And you mentioned, in another PM, the possibility of using multiple compilers ...
If you really must do things that exceed the capabilities of an old compiler, you can try to trick around it. Or you can just use a newer, better compiler. That's one reason why we develop GPC, BTW.
Frank