On 19 Jan 2010, at 14:39, Roland Turcan wrote:
<<< 19.01.2010 13:10 - Jonas Maebe "jonas.ma...@elis.ugent.be" >>>
JM> Oops, only now I see he was trying to index a pointer like an
array.
JM> And even in FPC I would very strongly recommend against
typecasting a
JM> dynamic array to a pointer and then performing operations using
this
JM> pointer. Dynamic arrays are opaque structures and trying to
directly
JM> access the underlying data should never be done.
But this ways is already used in LCL/FPC source as well.
I don't know about the LCL, but I guess in the FPC sources the only
place where this is done is inside the RTL helpers that are used to
manage the dynamic arrays. These by definition depend on the internal
layout of the dynamic array and will be updated if something would
change about dynamic arrays.
I also don't see any advantage to using a pointer instead of a dynamic
array directly. It will not be faster in any way, since there are no
uniqueness checks for dynamic arrays. In fact, it will probably be
slower, since you now have two variables in use: one to hold a
reference to the dynamic array, and one for the extra pointer.
Jonas
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