Node: Open Arrays, Previous: Conformant Arrays, Up: Parameters

#### BP's alternative to Conformant Arrays

Borland Pascal “open array” formal parameters are implemented into GPC. Within the function body, they have integer type index with lower bound 0.

In constrast to conformant arrays (which are not supported by BP), open arrays allow any ordinal type as the index of the actual parameter (which is useful, e.g., if you want to be able to pass values of any enumeration type). However, they lose information about the lower bound (which is a problem, e.g., if you want to return information to the caller that relates to the actual array index, like the function `IOSelect` in the Run Time System does).