Fun fact: the original author of Turbo Pascal, Anders Hejlsberg, went on to lead development of C# and then later TypeScript.
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Woah. Had no idea he was responsible for Turbo Pascal
And Delphi, where at least he tried to do something with strings hah. Never got used to them, and never really liked Wirth languages, but respect is due of course.
Delphi strings were really well implemented. Garbage collected (RC), multithread safe, length in first integer, fast, make them as big as your memory could handle. Reduced bad memory pointers a lot compared to competition at the time. Didn't handle the Unicode transition well: but virtually no languages did.
On the contrary, I'd say they handled the Unicode transition very well.
At work we had many, many thousands of lines manipulating strings, high and low level, and full project was over 300kLOC plus many heavy dependencies. We spent just a day or two to convert it to be Unicode capable.
Since we've had hardly any issues, and Unicode is not something we need to think about in the day-to-day.
Yes, he wrote Turbo Pascal while he was studying at DTU in Copenhagen.