Hello, Today I was playing around with some code and was getting some pretty wacky results from a couple string functions (anything from random trash to SIGSEGV.) It appears that for some reason strings that are defined in procedures/functions are not initialized to a length of 0.

For example: program test(output);

var a : string (10); begin writeln(length(a)) end.

On both Linux (gpc971001) and OS/2 (gpc980410) I get a result of 0, no problem.

However: program test(output);

var a : string (10);

begin writeln(length(a)); end.

Produces 65536 in OS/2 and 134515920 in Linux. Interestingly, if you declare more strings, usually by the third or fourth string the length will actually be 0 -- but I've seen gpc on Linux return negative integers too!

I'm not sure how much of a bug this is as I'm not sure that the user should assume *anything* about undefined variables. I haven't checked the EP standard about this yet. It probably should be set to 0 for BP compatibility as the code I was trying to port to GPC was written for TP and assumed undefined strings would have a 0 length.

-Kevin -- Kevin A. Foss --- kfoss@mint.net