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Mailing lists / fpc-pascal / 2010-06

Re: fpc-pascal Digest, Vol 72, Issue 15

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Ingemar Ragnemalm
spir wrote 9 lines
I'm surprised of this, fpc still systematically trying to follow Delphi, after so many years. I can understand that at the beginning the fpc team needed to mostly comply with Delphi, as de facto object pascal standard. But then, fpc could live its own life, possibly taking the best of Delphi's innovations, but not having as main goal to be always running after it. Fpc anyway has done different choices for some features (including choices of non-implementation), so why not having already made the step of declaring fpc a (object) Pascal dialect of its own?

First of all, I would like to saty that Pascal needs convergence and compatibility; it must be easy to adapt old code as well as being compatible between compilers. And with only three significant players (if my count is right: Delphi, FPC and GPC) that problem is quite a bit smaller than in the past when countless of companies were producing various dialects.

But there is of course another point, moving ahead. One major advantage of FPC is that it gives me all the advantages of C++ (performance, overloading), but none of its weaknesses (manual namespaces, lack of modularity, ugly syntax, questionable security). But the Pascal compilers I used in the 90's did not have that. I am not sure FPC would have been a viable choice today without these additions. So pleasew do not stop innovating!

Some problems can be handled by built in dialects, of which FPC have plenty. I am switching between modes a lot, and I often wish they could be merged a little bit. (MacPas and Delphi modes are quite different.)

I think my conclusion is that various compatibility modes are important, but I think FPC should rather be an innovative superset of Delphi than a clone that waits for the leader to move.

/Ingemar

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