[fpc-devel] Circular references and forward declarations

[Florian Klaempfl]

Marco van de Voort schrieb:
> In our previous episode, Florian Klaempfl said:
>>> Still, best solution has been to put everything into one big file. And still, 
>>> I don't like that compiler forces such a thing.
>> The compiler forces you many other things. Still, I don't get what's the
>> problem with a large unit if it's really needed (and nothing like
>> abstract base classes or interfaces or type casts or ... helps). Stuff
>> closely depending on each other should end in the same unit. You even
>> cannot test a unit with external circular class references without the
>> other involved units. So why should the stuff be separated?
> 
> I don't like extremely large (> few thousand lines) units from an overview
> perspective.

One can also say a lot of small files make it hard to find stuff
(remember the people to complain about the huge amount of files of the
fpc rtl :)?). With a good ide you don't care about this anymore: it
works the same with a lot of small files or one huge file.