CompuServe Messages

[Continued] C will also perform conversions from one variable type to another when it can, at times when pascal would throw up its arms in horror. This has its pros and cons. Sometimes the conversion is OK and your results are as expected. Other times a conversion results in the program behaving completely differntly to your expectations, sometimes requiring lengthy sessions with a debugger to find out why. As long as you are aware of this latent power and are careful in how you harness it, you can literally do _anything_ with it. It's no accident that most of the leading software packages (and even operating systems) are written in C. In summary, C is _much_ more flexible and offers the programmer a lot of power. In return, the programmer must be more disciplined in his coding methods; no sloppy coding here! Pascal insists that you write strongly structured code and will be suitable for all your needs, as long as you don't want to do anything too fiddly (i.e. files containing records of different lengths, etc) I'm sure there are many people who'll poke holes in my comments; especially as there are many more issues here than those outlined in this message. I look forward to a lively discussion! Good Luck; I hope this helps. Cheers, Bert.