Marco van de Voort wrote:
I think your original assumption was closer to the truth, at least for versions after 3. Featuritis, combined with the need to compete with Windows orientated competitors. (still the windows dependance of the language is not that large though)
I didn't claim that. AFAIK, only some small language elements are Windows oriented. But most existing code written for Delphi is probably quite Windows oriented.
Most is yes. But its publically available codebase is slowly getting larger than even TPs, and more important, a lot more advanced (XML processors, complete scripting languages etc) A few percents or ten percent maybe (if you take e.g. server only parts under IFDEF) that is reusable even make quite a large intersting base.
Borland C++ Builder can compile Pascal code.
You mean what Borland likes to call Pascal ...
What 99% of the Pascal programmers calls Pascal ;-)
No. Maybe 99% of Borland (and FPC, ...) users, but most of them are not Pascal programmers since these compilers don't support the Pascal language.
---- I've had enough of this. If you want to carry on a silly Jihad against Borland, then go on.
I've had more than my portion of this in the years I tried to approach GPC sensibly, and on common base instead of differences, and about implementing Pascal compilers and runtime libraries in general. I even recommended GPC in c.l.p.b for certain cases.
I will be unsubscribing from this list this week, because I realise that one can't create a dialogue with fanatics. Or at least I can't bear the nonsense for so little merit. And I've quite a thick skin, which was hardened by Modula2 ISO fanatics.
BTW Actually we tried to get a ISO (7xxx) mode project running for FPC, just for compabilities sake, though we didn't want to spent too much core workers time on it.... Nobody was interested. One of the c.p.l.ansi-iso regulars (can't remember who) was interested, but we never heard from him again. ----
[more ISO bible blabla skipped, resuming on some non or less propaganda stuff]
But Windows-only code can be also be a boost. Do you have estimates what percentage windows users there are under GPC users? For FPC I guess it Windows is twice as much as Linux, and the rest is 10% combined, so win32: 60%, linux: 30%, rest: 10%.
This might be true, but I'm not exactly interested in supporting non-free and non-portable software.
I joined FPC when I was a DOS programmer, and couldn't get GPC compiled. Now I do the FPC unix RTL.
Waiting for people to come to your ivory tower won't work. Even RMS realises that.
There are two reasons to implement that feature:
- You want to be Delphi compabitle someday: implement it, even though you hate it. (If it really requires completely new subsystems or other really difficult (manyear) stuff, because it e.g. conflicts too much with some ISO parts, then you can let it be the exception to the rule)
- You don't want Delphi compability, but it is a useful feature as a GPC specific extension on some of the supported dialects.
Please explain to me how this feature is useful, i.e., you can do anything with it that you can't do (easily) without?
I'd say this a typical parser thing. Read the sentence below. Mainly the "THESE parser and minor language details" part.
Personally I think you shouldn't start with Delphi compability at all until the compability with all currently supported dialects is roughly finished (I use quite a lot of qualified identifiers as a result of my Modula-2 period)
But I would start to try to make up my mind together with the people also putting time and effort into GPC in which direction the project will move: Delphi, yes/no/partial. And if partial, what features would be an option, and if full in what order do we implement them.
Simply because if you envision to implement them, and you work on spots now, you can make small preparations, and think about designs etc.
Otherwise you might implement 250 of these parser and minor language details (like variable result for the return value of functions),
Do you mean result variables (function foo = bar: baz)? They're actually standard (EP), and GPC has had them for a long time ...
No. That sounds like a thing that VB would have btw, but maybe the latest version of Delphi has it. They also copy from VB which is even worse than from C++ IMHO ;-)
Some things from memory, if you want a lot of stuff, try to run the publically available FPC testsuite with GPC, or just study it.
- functionresults can also be returned in pseudo local var "result" - "var" for initialised constants. (so VAR bla : sometype = value;) - In general Delphi allows a lot of small differences (places where a comma is optional etc) - resourcestring keyword.
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BYE!
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