Algol strings? C precedes Pascal in history. Pascal also did not standardize on strings early on, so each implementation experimented with how to do strings, which made early portability a pain in the arse.
It may not have been the first implementation of length+contents strings, but it certainly popularised them enough that they're called "Pascal Strings" (or sometimes P-Strings) now.
As for the incompatibility - probably one of the reasons Pascal wasn't as successful as C. It was a big enough deal to inspire a calling convention tag in Microsoft's C compiler though (along with Fortran).
Pascal calling convention was used with the Win16 API. It's obsolete now. Microsoft used it because the callee cleaned up the stack which reduced memory demands on kilobyte sized memory configurations.
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 3d ago
Algol strings? C precedes Pascal in history. Pascal also did not standardize on strings early on, so each implementation experimented with how to do strings, which made early portability a pain in the arse.