* Damien Gerard wrote, On 13/11/07 10:43:
>
> I don't think nobody is complaining here since everybody is free to
> use it or not.
> Oh some people complain about the widget encapsulation ??? So they
> don't use QT as well and if they want a multiplatform software what do
> they use ? Java ? :)
>
> And as it was said before, why using variants when standard types are
> enough ? Just to see in your code S := N instead of S := IntToStr(N); ?
For your example, you are converting the way that does not require
variants, so of course it shows that variants are not required. Please
excuse this example being in mostly-C;
int s;
if (data.t == D_INT) {
s=data.t_int.value;
} else if (data.t == D_LONGINT) {
if (data.t_longint.value > MAXINT) error();
s=data.t_longint.value);
} else if (data.t == D_STR) {
errno=0;
s=strtol(data.t_str.value, NULL. 10);
if (errno!=0) error();
} else {
error();
}
(I already spotted some mistakes, imagine maintaining all that rubbish)
At least in C you can come up with a load of helper macros.
And did you try and use COM in the delphi 1 days? It was utterly mad.
People made it work and THEN gave up.
Variants let the programmer concentrate on the meaning of the code when
integrating with other systems. Often the overhead of what was being
controlled was nothing to the overhead of the variant (and of course,
this was being managed by hand in Delphi 1 anyway). And the overhead of
writing code with variants was much less than writing code that did it
all by hand.
People keep re-inventing COM and variants all over the shop because they
don't have com and variants when the need them.
>
> Variants are good things but they were not created to allow lazy
> programming or implicit convertions. They were made in order to
> provide a dynamic type when you can't know the type of the variable
> (in SQL queries for example).
Maybe that's why there were made, but they were put into Delphi to
allow implicit conversions from unspecified types from systems that use
unspecified types, and to let Delphi use easily integrate with systems
that use unspecified types.
There's nothing wrong with an implicit conversion if the generated code
is pretty much exactly what you would (should) have explicitly written.
anyway... I think we fully explored other peoples opinions. I think you
don't like variants because they ways in which I (also) think other
people shouldn't use them are bad.
Sam
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