In reply to your message of July 23, 2003 > If we had a lot of hard working people, we could make a nice new set of > platform dependant units, and more and more TP units would become legacy.
This is a truly interesting discussion, I hope you don't mind a few comments from someone who's just now re-joining the programming game, as retirement approaches... On the subject of Strings and on a strictly personal note: I would prefer a language that is tightly integrated with an OS... so tightly that OS calls and language calls fit together in one smooth flow. I should not have to translate strings or use trickery like "A := B+A+#0" or "@A[1]" to get things to work. OS calls should be so seamless as to appear to be part of the language, not part of yet another complex bag of tricks that has to be studied and understood. I'm not saying you should mask API calls to make them look like Pascal syntax. Just the opposite, I'm thinking it might be better to bend Pascal to work better with the OS... Make it natively work with null terminated strings in windows, give it the same numerical structures as BEOS, support LINUX file handling in Pascal's normal file handlers, etc. Source code portability is a wonderful idea, but not at the expense of speed or power in the language. As a one time professional software developer, I'd rather write highly specific code that works flawlessly than have to mangle and mask things to get stuff to work. I do understand the need for cross-platform developement, especially with Linux nipping at Window's heels these days... but I would rather have to run a source code converter program once to switch platforms than to always run string, math and file converters on the platform I'm using... Just my 2 cents worth... ----- L D Blake _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
