Pascal --> C question

[Dave Jones]

in article <2500 at charon.unm.edu>, cs2531ar at charon.unm.edu (Andrea Humenick) says:
> 
> In article <4766 at sigi.Colorado.EDU> swarbric at tramp.Colorado.EDU (Frank Swarbrick) writes:
>>Or does the "packed" thing in Pascal have some special meaning?  I never could
>>figure out what the difference between a packed array and a regular array was.
> 
> I'm a new poster, so I'm sorry if this is improper.
> 
> In my current pascal class my teacher explained packed and not packed as
> this
> 
>         packed:   an array that can read in '       '
>     not packed:   an array that can only be read in character by character
> 
> thank you.


I think you may have misunderstood your instructor.  "Packed" does indeed
have special significance with regard to arrays of characters.  Specificly,
a packed array of characters indexed beginning with 1 is called a "string",
and may be *written* all at one go, rather than a character at a time.  
See "Standard Pascal User Reference Manual -- Doug Cooper", W. W.
Norton and Company, Inc. page 52.

You must have missed a whole bunch of recent postings about *reading* strings.
Standard Pascal does not support reading strings all at one go, perhaps
because the founding father couldn't make up his mind about how to handle
end-of-line conditions and short lines. Many Pascal implementations
do support reading strings, but don't count on it being portable.



		Dave Jones
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