Translation of blog post http://www.stolyarov.info/node/290 from Ru to En.
Sep 6 2020.
Author: Andrey Stolyarov, author of Ru books about programming.
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I'm trying to convince FPC men to finally fix SeekEof: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,51353.0.html
Tellingly, I even sent them a fix. Proven fix, Carl! One strange man has already run in (Jonas Maebe). It feels like receiving replies from officials. I wonder if everyone is like that, or is there still a reasonable person? Or maybe I got into the wrong place, I don't need to go to the forum, but immediately to the bugtracker?
UPD: I reported in the bug tracker:
https://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=37716 (
https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues/37716 ) Place your bets, I'll still have to write in the new edition of the book that the numbers from the text stream can be read correctly only character-by-character, or they will fix it.
UPD2: I received a response from someone in the bug tracker. I made a patch according to their rules. Submit. We stock up on popcorn.
UPD3: Christmas trees, where do such people come from and how is Free Pascal still alive with such a team?! And, most importantly, what to do now? I'm sorry, I won't be able to fork this monster, it's easier to write my own Pascal compiler, but it's not for one year of work.
UPD4: https://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=37833 ( https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues/37833 )- now we will convince them to fix the consequences of their fix, which "fixes" what is not broken. By God, if it weren't for the fact that there are simply no other implementations of Pascal, I would have spat on these comrades a long time ago. Sometimes it is easier for students (and what is there sometimes, just almost always) to explain what and how than to this stubborn character. This time, it's a little worse that I can't provide a ready-made patch - well, I probably can, but there are damn changes in git, it will be difficult to isolate among them those that this alternatively professional comrade made.
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In the comments of that post:
Q (reader): Judging by the state of the ticket, has success been achieved?
A (Stolyarov): To be honest, it's not clear - you'll have to pull out a snapshot and see. I really hope that this Tomas Hajny didn't understand what happens when you open a text stream and ended up not being able to do what he wanted to do -- cut off buffering for anything that isn't a file. If he succeeded, then "the victory has some strange taste" - SeekEof seems to have been fixed to us, but in general it has become even worse than before. To be honest, I didn't expect to encounter such a level of militant ignorance.
UPD: I looked. So yes. I don't even know what's worse - what happened before this "fix" or what happened after. It is quite difficult to do without the correct SeekEof, but you can - for example, read everything character by character and translate numbers with pens. But when buffering is turned off for output, it is impossible to turn it on from inside the program, no means are provided for this. The devil knows what.