CBFalconer wrote:
In my opinion sticking with standard methods such as this is much easier on the eventual system. You can have variations on the initializing code, so you can use it or a variation on various instances of the data. In addition, the initialization code is firmly separated, and thus is not in the working set (after use) on modern systems.
Oh, that depends. Most systems use page sizes of 4 KB and bigger, so unless the initialization code fills one or several such pages, it can be paged out later. If it's small, it may well lay within the same page(s) as routines use later, and thus stay in the working set.
Your so-called compile time initialization probably isn't, if you are declaring instances of the record locally. So the run time code is already there.
In this case, yes. (But for his huge tables, I suppose they're declared gobally.)
You may notice that I don't believe Pascal needs many extensions :-)
You know that I disagree, but since initializations are standard, anyway, that's not really the point here. (Though GPC currently supports only (non-standard) BP style initialization, and EP initialization only in simple cases.)
Frank