UCSD and Turbo-Pascal had it easy with the 255 byte strings. They had real strings but these were compiler extensions. Real Pascal didn't have string support an

UCSD and Turbo-Pascal had it easy with the 255 byte strings. They had real strings but these were compiler extensions. Real Pascal didn't have string support and you could only work with packed array of chars of fixed size and as the language was extremely strong types, to packed chars types of different lengths were considered different types, so you had to write procedures and functions for all used packed array sizes.