On Thu, 1 May 1997 04:12:47 +0200 Frank Heckenbach heckenb@mi.uni-erlangen.de wrote:
The African Chief wrote:
It would not be too difficult to make "MyStr.length" and "MyStr.String" accessible "record fields" of strings. Would it be desireable?
Yes! (At least length; the String part is accessible anyway with s[n].)
I am not sure how this fits into the standard ...
I'm not, either. If it conflicts, it should be disabled with "--extended-pascal", I suppose.
It should be disabled, with "-borlland-pascal" as well.
But how would you translate references to s[0] in BP then? I know, there shouldn't be any in most programs, but sometimes it can be useful, e.g. for efficiency. But it's ok for me if it's only enabled with {$X+}, see below.
"s[0] := ..." is okay. I do that myself sometimes (but only to set the length to zero). What I was referring to was something like;
"length(s) := ...." or "s.length := ..."
- which shouldn't compile (if at all), when using "--borland-pascal".
Does this mean strings will always have an additional trailing #0? Do the string routines currently support this (i.e. automatically add a #0 at the end; but they should not recognize #0 as a terminator, but only rely on the length field)? That would be good, because it simplifies converting a string into a CString a lot (just "CString(@s[1])", right?).
Delphi 2 does this with long strings (I think). If we are going to do it, perhaps it should only be done for long strings as well?
However, what happens when you want to add a string to the end of it? Check this example, and look at the ouput under Borland;
program Fred; var s,s1:string[40]; begin s := 'Fred Smith'+#0; s1 := s + 'is okay'; writeln ( s1 ); {prints "Fred Smith is okay" - where did the space before "okay" come from? I didn't want or put it there - viz; problem with trailing "#0"} end.
Best regards, The Chief Dr Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief, and the Great Elephant) Author of: Chief's Installer Pro v3.12 for Win16 and Win32. Homepage: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/African_Chief/ E-mail: laa12@cc.keele.ac.uk
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The African Chief