CBFalconer wrote:
As far as an extended throw-away syntax is concerned, I have seen far too many C failures due to ignoring a return value (especially malloc/realloc, but including fclose, printf, etc) than is comfortable, and I see no need to encourage such bad C habits in Pascal.
I agree with that. Worse -- the whole Win32 API (and some of the later parts of Mac OS) are based on this bad habit. Many Win32 functions return values that are useless in most situations, simply because in C they can be ignored. Some functions return an error result code, but never consistently. The result is of course instable software, because very few programmers pay attention to all the details if tricky and variable from situation to situation.
Bad habits in programming tend to get worse all the time and then the final result is invariably a total mess.
Regards,
Adriaan van Os