What is this colon for?

[JoSno]

Hi guys,

I'm busily porting some SVS Pascal to run under GPC and the compiler has got very upset at (nearly) this line...

myArray : ARRAY [1..myConst,1:50] OF myType;

Any ideas what that colon does in the second dimension of the array declaration?

This was written in Corel some 20 years ago and was ported automaticaly by a 3rd party converting program about 19 years ago so I have no chance of finding the "author" to ask him!

Cheers!

 

[stackdump]

I've no idea about Corel but the statement;

x : ARRAY [1..a,1..b] OF CHAR;

is equivalent to

x : ARRAY [1..a] OF ARRAY[1..b] OF CHAR;

So in your example I guess myArray is a 2 dimensional array with myConst*50 elements.

 

[JoSno]

I agree that it is definitely a second dimension for the array, and from the code (if elementAt(array[n,m] < 50)) I can judge that it is something limiting the value that can be held there to a range of maximum 50.

However I'm reluctant to just change it to a range of 1..50 before I know exactly what it was meant to do (this is highly safety related stuff) so I don't end up in jail in a few years for killing anybody!!

The fact that the original author (of the Corel code at least) has made the first dimenstion a range, and the second dimension is very deliberatly not a simple range means I have to look into it some more

Thanks for your help