This SHOULD NOT work in BP or any flavor of Pascal, any more than the following should work:

const Digit: array[0..255] of 0..9 = 123456789101112;

A string is a different data type than an array of char, with a lot of different methods.

I am surprised tht BP identifies short arrays of char with short strings.

Would (and should) this work?

program foo;

var ch1, ch2, ch3: array[1..100] of char;

begin ch1 := '123'; ch2 := '456'; ch3 := ch1+ch2; (* or ch3 := Concat(ch1, ch2); *) Writeln(ch3, ' ', Length(ch3)); end.

I say absolutely not. HF

I tried this, and it does not compile. The Borland compiler will not allow ch1 := '123'; Assigning a string value to a character array is a shortcut for initializing character arrays so that you don't have to write Const ch: array[1..100] of char = ('H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'); Instead you can write Const ch: array[1..100] of char = 'Hello'; However this works only in Const clauses, and only when the size of the array elements is less than 256 characters. 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; Frank Rubin