[fpc-devel] Questions on TStringList.Find change (Mantis 28744)

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2016, David Jenkins wrote:

> I just ran across the change that checks Sorted at beginning of find and 
> exits if Sorted = False.  This has caused some problems for us
>
> a)  We have lists that are sorted manually and we'd like to continue keeping 
> them sorted manually (and be able to call .insert()).  This means not setting 
> the sorted flag.  But without setting 'sorted' we can no longer use find.  We 
> are sharing code between VCL and FPC - delphi compatibility has been broken.
>
> b) The change, in my opinion, hasn't solved the unpredictable response 
> problem.  There is still nothing to indicate to a caller that they have 
> called the function inappropriately i.e. they do not know why find has 
> returned false.
>
> Furthermore the documentation also indicates that if false is returned then 
> 'Index' will contain the position where the string should be inserted.  Index 
> used to at least be within the range of FCount or 0.  Now the value 'Index' 
> is even more indeterminte as the code exits before Index has been set to 
> anything.  It has gone from possibly placing a string at a wrong location to 
> possibly causing a crash with index out of range.
>
> It could be argued whether this is worse but it certainly doesn't seem to 
> have made the situation any better for people blindly misusing Find an 
> unsorted list - while at the same time breaking Delphi compatibility and the 
> option to manually keep lists sorted.
>
> Thoughts?

We can introduce a property which disables the check, if you want.

Michael.