[fpc-devel] Re: Testing for..in feature

[Matt Emson]

Marco van de Voort wrote:
> Sparse enums are simply a kludge. They were needed because they exist in the Windows API, and afaik for that only. IOW for easy translation of Windows types.
>   

They were added to Delphi in version 6. I though they added them to 
support Qt and the CLX, which relied on Qt as its underlying base 
toolkit. They were common in C/C++ before that though.

The problem I always had with Pascal supporting them was that a Pascal 
enum was designed to represents the position in a sequence and not 
necessarily an underlying integral value - where as a sparse enum is 
simply a grouping for a bunch of numerical values at the whim of the 
developer.