Do not built things into the compiler (or ask for them) that can be done outside of it. Building in things is many times as much work. Maybe I haven't stressed this enough so far because it's so obvious to me, but not to those who haven't worked in the compiler.
I understand, but the balance changes when 10 people, or 100 or 1000 people need to do the same thing. Which is more work, a compiler writer making a hard change, or 100 people each writing a set of relatively straightforward code? That's why we try to identify features that will be widely used, such as vector arithmetic.
FPC already supports assignments of vectors and arrays, so why not addition and subtraction? It builds on a capability that the compiler already has.
Frank Rubin