[fpc-pascal] Strange message about mixed signed expression

[waldo kitty]

On 1/22/2014 5:39 PM, Frederic Da Vitoria wrote:
> 2014/1/22 waldo kitty <wkitty42 at windstream.net <mailto:wkitty42 at windstream.net>>
>
>     the string type is/was a 256 character array with the 0th (zero-th) element
>     containing the length of the string... this allowed one to immediately know
>     how many characters to read at once... it was much faster than iterating
>     thru the array looking for a nul byte as done in other languages...
>
>     it was quite innovative at the time and actually lead to the Hudson Message
>     Base format being developed by Adam Hudson of QuickBBS fame when he was in
>     high school (grades 10-12)... this message base format was the greatest
>     thing since sliced bread when it came out and many other BBS packages
>     adopted it because of its amazing speed and the large number of messages
>     that could be stored with it...
>
>
> What was innovative?

the type, itself... it did not exist previously and if there was anything like 
it, it was written specially by coders needing... this is likely how it came to 
be included, too... i simply do not recall since that was what? some 35+ years ago?

> Storing the length as byte 0? I believe old Basic had been doing it for
> years  before. Basic is not a language I like, but still...

i don't know how BASIC (which BASIC??) did it... each implementation, like the 
various pascals, could do things their own way behind the scenes as long as the 
results were the same... witness FPC with what it does to achieve the same 
results as other pascal languages ;)

as for not liking BASIC, when i found TP and actually learned ASM, i left BASIC 
in the dust and never looked back... when i had to start writing dBase II code, 
it was like a huge step backwards to BASIC for me... i tended to write my dBase 
II code like i did my pascal code... going as low level as i could... oh well... 
that was then and dBase is not even around any more AFAIK...

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