What the heck, I'll toss in my two cents' worth.... BTW, this applies the Borland Object Pascal of today, and most of this applies as far back as 1995. Pointers: They are true pointers--not just references. Add constants to pointers: Yep. Max string length: 0..4GB - 1 Convert between short string (max length 255), string (max len 4GB - 1), and null-terminated strings: Yes, usually completely automatic. Typically not automatic only if not safe to do so. Open/Close/Read/ReadLn/Write/WriteLn/Assign/Reset/Rewrite: Still there, if you want/need them. Or you can use streams instead. >Borland's implementation of Pascal was so poor, it basically killed the >language. Maybe that was the real intent all along. I'm not sure what burned you so bad on the language. Anyway, I'd have to disagree: Borland's implementation is still quite alive and well. I can't say that about most of the other flavors, no matter what the platform. Most new implementations seem to use Borland's as the baseline to emulate. Lee Behrens