Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote:
anti-adding-keyword people, a good idea really, 'USES INTERFACE
name,
USES IMPLEMENTATION name', or sim.)
Much better already (syntactically).
Though, actually, it's not qutie accurate. It would sound like "use the interface/implementation part". But, of course, always the interface part is used, while this is about re-exporting.
Actually, that was about static/shared units (at least I thought it was...):
If using a SHARED unit (library), only parts of the 'INTERFACE' are compiled into the currently-in-production target, whereas with a STATIC unit (library), the 'IMPLEMENTATION' is included as well.
That was my logic beind it, and in this way, you don't add any keywords, and it still looks clean, like the rest of Pascal does/should.
Sorry, I can't follow you. I was talking about static and shared (aka dynamic) libraries on the linker level. As I tried to explain, that's a purely linker issue, nothing to do with the Pascal source. It also doesn't have anything to do with interfaces and implementations -- both static and shared libs must contain all interfaces and implementations, because they are meant to be used "stand-alone" by other code.
And all of this is mostly independent of the "unit inheritance" issue (which I thought your suggestion was about) -- except that an extreme form of unit inheritance seems to be mostly equivalent to a (BPish) library. But for BP libraries, there is already a syntax, so we probably don't need to invent anything new. If we make up something new, it would be for selective unit inheritance ...
Frank