Pascal as a professional programming tool was pretty much dead by the mid 80's, although Wirth's book on algorithms and data structures was probably still in use and had a Pascal style syntax for the examples. Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of C could pick up Pascal in a couple of days.
What I was alluding to is that in Pascal, one defines the size of an array by the valid indices for that array. For example,
someString: array [0..99] of char;
defines a C style array of 100 bytes, indexed from 0 to 99
But to get a bit weird...
fooArray: array [-100..100] of foo;
defines an array of type foo containing 201 elements that can be indexed from -100 to 100. And yes, any arbitrary values such as 17..77 can be used.
This maybe useful for some programming problems, but I've never needed anything like it.
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Date: 2009-12-28 04:43 pm (UTC)Pascal as a professional programming tool was pretty much dead by the mid 80's, although Wirth's book on algorithms and data structures was probably still in use and had a Pascal style syntax for the examples. Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of C could pick up Pascal in a couple of days.
What I was alluding to is that in Pascal, one defines the size of an array by the valid indices for that array. For example,
someString: array [0..99] of char;
defines a C style array of 100 bytes, indexed from 0 to 99
But to get a bit weird...
fooArray: array [-100..100] of foo;
defines an array of type foo containing 201 elements that can be indexed from -100 to 100. And yes, any arbitrary values such as 17..77 can be used.
This maybe useful for some programming problems, but I've never needed anything like it.