5.6 Strings

Some languages, like C or the original Pascal, do not have string types, they just have related things like arrays of characters. But most Pascals and various other languages have string types, which are indicated as follows:

n type-information ; bytes

bytes is the maximum length. I'm not sure what type-information is; I suspect that it means that this is a string of type-information (thus allowing a string of integers, a string of wide characters, etc., as well as a string of characters). Not sure what the format of this type is. This is an AIX feature.

z type-information ; bytes

Just like ‘n’ except that this is a gstring, not an ordinary string. I don't know the difference.

N

Pascal Stringptr. What is this? This is an AIX feature.

Languages, such as CHILL which have a string type which is basically just an array of characters use the ‘S’ type attribute (see String Field).