Re:Git's list of banned C functions
by int_19h on Thursday March 04, 2021 @07:25PM
(#26350598)
Strings as they existed in standard Pascal were extremely limited in how you could work with them, since it didn't have true dynamic arrays.
Strings as implemented in e.g. Borland Pascal were better. But then, the length-prefixed implementation had its own downsides. For example, it had to decide how many bits to use for length. 16-bit Pascal would generally use a single byte, and in BP at least, you could even access it as a character via S[0]. Thus, strings were limited to 256 bytes max - and because this was baked into the ABI, it wasn't something that could be easily changed later.
Hence when Delphi decided to fix it, they basically had to introduce a whole new string type, leaving the old one as is. And then they added a bunch of compiler switches so that "string" could be an alias for the new type or the old, as needed in that particular code file.
Strings as implemented in e.g. Borland Pascal were better. But then, the length-prefixed implementation had its own downsides. For example, it had to decide how many bits to use for length. 16-bit Pascal would generally use a single byte, and in BP at least, you could even access it as a character via S[0]. Thus, strings were limited to 256 bytes max - and because this was baked into the ABI, it wasn't something that could be easily changed later.
Hence when Delphi decided to fix it, they basically had to introduce a whole new string type, leaving the old one as is. And then they added a bunch of compiler switches so that "string" could be an alias for the new type or the old, as needed in that particular code file.