Wirth's Pascal didn't have a string type. You could have a fixed-length arrty of CHAR, but you couldn't have _fewer_ than 16 characters in a 16-character array,

Wirth's Pascal didn't have a string type. You could have a fixed-length arrty of CHAR, but you couldn't have _fewer_ than 16 characters in a 16-character array, and you couldn't pass a 16-character-array to a function with a 256-character-array parameter. Only the magic ‘functions’ built in to the language like write() could accept strings of different lengths. Since this made the language worse than FORTRAN and handling text, most implementations added some sort of string handling.