On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 00:23, Marco van de Voort <[email protected]> wrote: > > Since we are close to 20 stringtypes + conversions now, I doubt that this is > really the problem.
Yes, I agree that the string types in FPC are a mess, and judging by recent discussion, they are planned to became worse. It is fortunate that Lazarus introduces a little bit of sanity here. > What problem does "for in" really solve? Lack of iterators. > Is having 6 levels of information > hiding (private,public,strict protected, strict private,protected,published) > or are the strict* ones just to stop the whining of people that come from > other languages? No, it is not necessary, but handy sometimes. I agree that these are not a big deal, and FPC can live without them quite fine, but they do not break anything either. > What is the function of being able to add methods to records? Not much, I agree, given the existence of objects. It would be better to do that instead of introducing 'object' keyword, but that decision was made back in the days of Borland Pascal. > What is the real use of duplicating const type and var as nested variants > inside classes? Namespace management. > Have a look at: > http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/delphilater.txt Thanks, that is interesting discussion. I will post my thoughts on that in a separate mail. > The old rule used to be that > - it should make something possible that is not doable otherwise. Like strict private/protected? > - _or_ it should be a construct that is used so much that timesavings are > noticable Like for ... in? > And string-case for my feeling belongs in neither. It is just about racking > up bullet lists in language wars. Well, there is another important design principle. It is sometimes called "orthogonality" -- it means that existing language features can be combined in any way, with as little limitation as possible. Since string was introduced as built-in "scalar" type with defined equality, lack of 'case' support can be viewed as a design bug. -- Alexander S. Klenin _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
