On Sat, 26 Jan 2013, Alexander Klenin wrote:
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Michael Van Canneyt
<mich...@freepascal.org> wrote:
WITH EACH ADDITIONAL "FEATURE" WE ARE BUTCHERING PASCAL MORE AND MORE.
Hm... Do not you think this is a bit of an overstatement?
No, not really.
I really feel that we are deviating a lot from what pascal stands for.
There are plenty to choose from. He said maybe he'd look after fcl-stl. The
silence since was deafening.
"for-in-index" extension was actually planned by me as a prerequisite
for fcl-stl work.
I did some experiments with the current implementation, even discussed
it at a conference related to teaching of algorithmic programming to children.
As I have already explained, main competition in this area now comes
from Python and other dynamic languages.
While discussing container access in Pascal vs Python,
lack of "for-in-index" was brought up by attendees as one of Pascal's
weaknesses.
You can always find things missing in any language.
I miss compilation, and other low-level things in Python.
It depends on what you value.
He said he needed a arbitrary precision math library: Well, get started !
I have chosen a good library, communicated with the author, and he
agreed (on this list)
to allow its inclusion in FPC. Now somebody (not me, since I do not
have commit rights)
should perform the addition.
Great news !
Both should be perfectly within grasp of a student.
If he has students, let them work on that.
Unfortunately there are specific requirements for this type of student work
(it is approximately equivalent to bachelor's thesis).
"A single large new feature" is much better suited to it then
"polishing the library, with many small refactorings and improvements".
Note that for Vasily, "for-in-index" if not actually this "large feature",
it was chosen by me as a relatively minor and simple feature to introduce him
to the code base and the community.
I am sorry that the community turned out not quite welcoming.
You could have asked in advance and be spared the disappointment.
Pascal needs more useful libraries.
It is important to note that default libraries ARE part of the language
You are wrong there.
I am talking about libraries that perform actual tasks. Not containers.
PDF generating, https protocol and whatnot.
Those are definitely not part of the language.
and from the user's POV language vs library distinction is an irrelevant detail.
We have different ideas of what libraries are.
The STL is not what I have in mind when I speak about a library.
What is important is a clear, concise and easy-to-remember syntax.
Exactly. But we seem to have different ideas about what that is.
The student will have to remember 4 different syntaxes.
For a:=b to c do
for a:=b downto c do
for a in b do
for a in b index c do
Concise ? I don't think so.
And let us not forget that the last one is a highly abstract one,
because you need a lot of concepts before you can explain why it
is needed and how to use it.
The first one, by contrast, is so simple that any 12-year old can get it.
Michael.
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