Hi,
Just wandering if any of you are interested in modernising Pascal which is looking quite dated when compared to modern languages like Python. I note free pascal supports a variety of pascal dialects but none of them are particular modern.
My main gripes with Delphi/pascal is its additional verbosity and somewhat tedious coding practices which seem superfluous in some cases. Now I dont mind typing a bit extra to make code cleaner and more legible but I have a few ideas which would reduce needless typing and improve clarity at the same time.
(feel free to shoot down any of these ideas)
1. Memory management. Delphi is quite incosistent here by allowing component classes to be auto managed (via their owner) whilst non-component class have to be manually managed. The best solution I can think for this is to reference count non-component classes. This should be safe for TObjects but obviously not for Tcomponent descendants (cf circular reference problem) so a protected variable could be added to TObject to specify whether to ref count it or not (with TComponent turning it off). This will improve legibility of code too as there will no longer be a need for having loads of try..finally statements to free stuff. Backwards compatibility should not be affected so if you call a free method it will free it whatever its ref count.
2. For Each. Its in Delphi 2005 and every modern language implements it.
3. Increasing the number of base types to include common stuff like lists (Tlist, TStringList). Python does this nicely and theres no reason Pascal cant. Base types are dynamically allocated and reference counted so theres no need to explicitly create or destroy them. The following code would therefore work :
var strlist : Stringlist;
begin
strlist.add('mystring');
end;(note I did not use a T in front of StringList so as to distinguish it from non-base types and also to maintain backwards compatibility with existing code that uses TStringList conventionally)
jamie.
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