This was 'solved' with pointers, didn't? (symbol ^) Well, we're talking about at least 25 years ago, so I clearly not remember this hiccup whatsoever

You can work around this - Turbo Pascal's strings are essentially syntax sugar for

    type string = record Length: Byte; Chars: array [1..255] of Char end;

You can use this to make your own string handling procedures, the hardest part would be passing arbitrary string literals but that could probably worked around too with conversion functions.