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From: davidsco@atm.com (Davidson Corry)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Ada/Pascal (was Re: Why don't large companies use Ada?)
Date: 22 Nov 1994 21:50:12 GMT
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Date: 1994-11-22T21:50:12+00:00
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In article <3alh02$rgo@holly.csv.warwick.ac.uk>, csusb@csv.warwick.ac.uk (Jules) says:
>
>May I add that I am eagerly anticipating the coming of Ada into my life.
>It must be better than the Pascal they're making us poor first years use,
>I thought this language was supposed to be easy to learn. WITHOUT ANY STRING
>OPERATIONS BUILT IN? Why?

Because Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal as a tool for teaching the fundamentals
of programming, and he did not consider "string" a fundamental data type.
A string is something you build up, _using_ the char data type and the concept
of array.

Of course, the omission of strings (and other things like random file I/O) made
it difficult to use Pascal for "real world" programming... for which purpose
Wirth had not intended it anyway.

For what it's worth (no pun intended), C and C++ don't have a fundamental
string type, either.  What they have is two bits of syntactic convenience --

    1) the name of an array is equivalent to a pointer to
        its initial element

    2) "a string in quotes" is compiled as an array of char,
        with a null added to the end of the array

-- that make it easy to use [null-terminated array of char] as if it _were_
a built-in "string type".  A raft of functions that accreted over the years
and were eventually standardized into the run-time library make it even
easier to use it that way... and harder to use any other implementation 
of "string" in a C program.  And of course the String class that's part of
the standard C++ library makes it effectively part of the language, even
though in the strictest sense it's not.