Spark is Ada not Pascal. Pascal strings used to have their actual length in a field at the beginning of the string. Imagine how many off by one errors and how

Spark is Ada not Pascal. Pascal strings used to have their actual length in a field at the beginning of the string. Imagine how many off by one errors and how many (even hidden) calls to strlen() that saves. All they needed to modernize Pascal is some library code to resize the buffer if needed, just like curly brace languages. It may already be present in modern Pascal implementations, I haven't followed. Pascal also has array bounds checking by default. Imagine how many out of bounds errors this could prevent. But no, you have to have curly braces instead and build layers and layers of classes and languages over classes, all over the same impractical string representation.