How to use files in standard Pascal - standards

Question

In standard Pascal (ISO7185), there was no procedure Assign that would've let a programmer to assign some kind of file name to a file variable. It only appeared in Turbo Pascal and other derivates.
So... how am I supposed to open a handle to a specific file if I comply with the standard?
Closest I've found is this Irie Pascal example:
program vowels(f, output);
var
f : file of char;
tot, vow : integer;
c : char;
begin
reset(f);
tot := 0;
vow := 0;
while not eof(f) do
begin
read(f, c);
case c of
'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u',
'A', 'E', 'I', 'O', 'U'
: vow := vow + 1;
otherwise
end;
tot := tot + 1;
end;
writeln('Total characters read = ', tot);
writeln('Vowels read = ', vow)
end.
which suggests I might be able to give the file name as a startup parameter. This works using Irie Pascal. However, if I try to use that with P5, which should be closest to standard-compiliant Pascal compiler for modern computers I've found, I get (after replacing 'otherwise') **** Error: external file unknown 'f '. So, what'd be the standard way? Or is this actually the standard way and P5 is doing something wrong?
Edit: standard also gives a sample
program copy (f, g);
var f,g : file of real;
begin
reset(f) ; rewrite(g);
while not eof(f) do
begin
g^ := f^ ; get(f) ; put(g)
end
end.
but I haven't been able to get that to work with any compiler.
Edit2:
Doing it like this:
program copy (f, g);
var f,g : file of char;
begin
reset(f) ; rewrite(g);
while not eof(f) do
begin
g^ := f^ ; get(f) ; put(g)
end
end.
works just fine in Irie and is compliant with the standard. Using that, file name can be given as a startup parameter.
However, as explained by Marco van de Voort,
ISO 7185 does not have any standard way for a program to specify
file names at all, so any such way is already beyond 7185 (Bind
is ISO 10206, Assign is UCSD/BP, the 2nd parameter to Reset is
an extension of GPC and I think some other compilers).
(source)

Answer 1

IIRC this was for VMS support where the OS bound files before starting the program.
Unbound files were automatically tempfile iirc. Search the GNU Pascal maillists (old archives, say 2005 or so), they had quite some discussions about ISO file implementation.

Answer 2

It was Scope on the CDC 6000 series machines. However, the rest is correct. You basically assigned external files to logical header file names in the Scope command language.
Of course this seems very tedious now, but these were the days of the batch mode computer, where everything was submitted as a "deck" of cards to be run as input, then collected as a series of output "cards". Tape reels got rid of the actual cards, but tapes were treated as a collection of cards on a tape.
In normal use, Wirth's original compilers were actually limited to just an input and an output file. If you wanted more than one input file, you concatenated them. This was easier than it sounds, since most input and output files were text, and every file had distinct end tolkens in it.
This paradigm fit well with the idea that you mounted an input tape and an output tape for a job on a batch system. The job of the batch computer was to linearly process the input tape and produce the output tape. A large and fast machine would have several jobs concatenated onto a single tape and run sequentially.
The option of a high speed printer typically rounded out the system. Thus, a college kid in the 1960s learning computer science would punch a deck on what looked like a typewriter (or get it typed by a keypunch operator), then that deck would be collected and transcribed to a tape deck and scheduled to run. An hour or more later, you were handed a section of greenbar from the printer that represented the output from your program.
Anyways, its always a good debate question as to why Wirth put that limitation in the language. Probabaly it was for the simple reason that the CDC 6000 machines could not have dealt with a feature that randomly opened a file by name. Also remember that the predecessor to Pascal, Algol, had no I/O statements whatever! They considered I/O to be inherently machine specific.
Scott Moore