According to Pierre Phaneuf:

According to myself (Peter Gerwinski):

...

Okay for ordinal types, sets and pointers, not sure about Reals. Strings initialized to zero this way are BROKEN because they get a capacity of zero which makes them useless. :-( That's one reason why I would like to have `ShortString's in GPC.)

Ok, right, so FillChar() is a BAD idea... Ok! :-)

... except if you know exactly that no implicitly initialized types - at the moment, these are File and Schema (including String) types - are present in the object. Since they don't belong there anyway (pointers to Strings are better than Strings here), `FillChar' can still be useful (while dangerous - which it is always).

At least a `BPcompat Objects' Unit *must* have this FillChar. :-|

Greetings,

Peter

Dipl.-Phys. Peter Gerwinski, Essen, Germany, free physicist and programmer peter.gerwinski@uni-essen.de - http://home.pages.de/~peter.gerwinski/ [970201] maintainer GNU Pascal [970510] - http://home.pages.de/~gnu-pascal/ [970125]