I agree that the introduction of managed data types is inconsistent with
previous Pascal data types. Perhaps it is a design flaw to have changed
the semantics of reference-counted data types. Perhaps not.
Nevertheless, it has been this way for many, many years and will not be
changed at this point.
I am not sure whether this now cast in stone forever. Errors *can* be corrected
sometimes. ;-)
Correct. The language is no longer as simple and clear and easy as it was.
The rule now is that you need to know if the data types you use are
managed (reference-counted) or not. If they are, you must be aware that
lower-level operations such as Move and FillChar will not work the way
they did with earlier data types. That is one of the things you trade
for the convenience of having some details managed for you when using
managed data.
A simple solution would be to use the address the pointer is pointing to
(address of first element) for fillchar/move too. Then it would be consistent
and the identifier would mean the array in all cases. Because it was stated
that these functions should not be used for dynamic arrays anyway only a few
code changes would be required to existing code but it would save generations
of programmers the anger they have with it now.
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