On Sat, 21 Jul 2018, Ben Grasset wrote:
On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 1:20 AM, Sven Barth via fpc-pascal <
fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
Because a feature might change the language in a way that's not in the
spirit of the language. Look at how Delphi implemented attributes: they're
declared in front of the types, fields, parameters, whatever, simply copied
from how C# implemented them while in the spirit of Pascal they should have
been *after* the declarations.
Regards,
Sven
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C# itself is heavily inspired by Delphi though, as it's another Anders
Hejlsberg project. I fail to see what the "spirit of the language" has to
do with anything as far as attributes, either.
Shouldn't the attribute tags just be put wherever it's easiest for the
compiler to deal with them?
Exactly our point.
That would be behind the declaration, where all other modifiers are put
(default, stored, nodefault, or all procedure and variable modifiers)
Deciding to put them in front of the declaration broke years of tradition,
and most certainly was not leveraging existing compiler infrastructure.
I think the vast majority of people care far more about how *useful
Pascal actually is in real life* than they do
about whether or not it fulfills some not-well-defined notion of "spirit".
I think even D7 pascal is useful in real life. I could easily work with it
still today, and need none of the things introduced afterwards. I am still
as productive as I was with D7.
Things that change my productivity are libraries to accomplish tasks,
not language features.
Also, as far as I can tell, most of the people who use FPC would consider
the Delphi way to be the correct or normal way of doing things in the first
place.
For the features they introduced first, maybe.
But for operator overloading and (IIRC) generics, FPC introduced them first.
FPC also introduced the ObjC dialect to be able to import the native interfaces
of Mac.
Delphi decided to go another way in all of these cases.
Were they correct or normal ? I don't think so.
Did they consult with us ? No, they did not.
While we definitely want to be Delphi compatible, I don't think we're in
any way less of an authority on all things Pascal.
With the brain drain in Embarcadero of the last years, these days I would even
claim the opposite.
Michael.
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