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3.4.3 Why does s[0] not contain the length?

Q: In standard Pascal you expect s[1] to align with the first character position of s and thus one character to the left is the length of s. Thus s[0] is the length of s. True?

A: This holds for UCSD/BP strings (which GPC does not yet implement, but that's planned). The only strings Standard Pascal knows are arrays of char without any length field.

GPC also supports Extended Pascal string schemata (see String schema), but they also don't have a length byte at “position 0”, but rather a Length field (which is larger than one byte).