According to Frank Heckenbach:

[...] Then perhaps it would be useful to allow the same syntax also for ShortStrings (additionally), just as if ShortString[n] was declared as:

record case boolean of false:(CurrentLength:byte); true:(string:array[0..n] of char); end;

Also, it could be good to provide a (read-only) "pseudo field" Capacity. [...] These two things would make ShortStrings more similar to (and often exchangeable with) LongStrings, without giving up BP compatibility.

Good ideas, but a lot of work ...

(BTW: LongStrings' Capacity is always read-only, isn't it?)

It is not. Probably it should be - somebody knows? And for other schema discriminants?

BP 7.0 allows this via High(s) -- is something like BP's High and Low functions (to give the lower and upper bounds of arrays and subrange types) present or planned for gpc? [...]

Yes.

[...] So, perhaps better forget about the #0 with ShortStrings, and add it when converting to other strings...

I think that's the way to go.

But UCSD was non-standard, too, wasn't it? Just out of curiosity, it doesn't really matter to me.

UCSD Pascal was developed at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), not by a company, that's why I consider it as a well-defined standard, although no ISO standard. I have read about a company "SofTech" distributing UCSD Pascal, and I got mine from Apple as "Apple Pascal". If somebody has some more exact information, I would be glad to know.

Greetings,

Peter

Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [970201] maintainer GNU Pascal [970420] - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]