[fpc-devel] weak referencing (was Suggestion:.....)

[Sven Barth]

On 23.09.2014 02:24, John Briggs wrote:
>
> Why has there been so many messages on this list debating the pros and cons
> of reference counting objects?
> The beauty of the Pascal language is in its structure ie:
> procedures,functions,OOP. Why does it need to be a functional programming
> language as well when there are Haskell, Lisp, Scheme and other functional
> languages that have already done the hard work.

Because people want new features. There are Delphi programmers that look 
at FPC and think "It does not support XYZ, so I won't use it", even if 
it would allow them to target a broader user range. And then there are 
FPC programmers that look at Delphi (or other languages) and think "I 
wish FPC would support that" (I'm often part of that latter category ;) ).
Also ARC has nothing to do with functional programming languages, 
afterall Objective C has ARC as well and I wouldn't consider that a 
functional language ;)

Regards,
Sven