Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, David Mears wrote:
is this bit of syntactic weirdness a fpc element, or from delphi. I've
largely been away from pascal since the early 90s, mostly only using it to
write dos-y non-object-y utilities, for which it excels.
typed constants seem to basically to be like the static keyword from c.. but
not a var modifier.. It just seems it should be a modifier for var. such as
var st:string static;.. since.. constant is usually pretty wrapped up in the
meaning of "not changing." and that it has a constant, initialized, reserved
place in memory is.. well.. abstract. Especially since you can initialize
your variables now, then the only thing that makes it special is that it is a
global variable with a local scope.
I'm not the sort who thinks pascal should be C, because I hate having to work
with C or it's work likes. I just think that being able to call something
constant and change it muggles the syntactic clarity of the language, which is
otherwise rather good.
Initialized constants are deprecated, and should be replaced by initialized
variables, as in Delphi:
Var
A : String = 'Some string';
"Real" constants (in the sense of 'not changing') do not need to be typed in
the first place so
Const
A = 'Some String';
Will do just fine. You now have both possibilities and they each have clear
and unambiguous meaning.
Michael.
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I was less interested in the initialized part- which I'm happy you can
do with variables now but would not be overly concerned setting them in
code as I always had to in the past, as the "It should be stressed that
typed constants are initialized at program start. This is also true of
local typed constants." Which I take it to mean that they retain their
value when out of scope, which provides encapsulation at a level that
can only otherwise be done with objects.
like
function HowManyBirds:integer;
const n: integer = 1;
begin
n:=n * 2;
end;
ignoring that the function here is useless, that's a useful ability..
while you can define variables anywhere not in procedure, nothing else
quite does that. It's just I'd rather it be
var n: integer = 1; static;
var n: integer = 1; fixed;
or some such. It makes more sense linguistically, in an otherwise very
sensible language. :)
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