[fpc-devel] Modernising Pascal

[Jamie McCracken]

Hi,

Just wandering if any of you are interested in modernising Pascal which 
is looking quite dated when compared to modern languages like Python. I 
note free pascal supports a variety of pascal dialects but none of them 
are particular modern.

My main gripes with Delphi/pascal is its additional verbosity and 
somewhat tedious coding practices which seem superfluous in some cases. 
Now I dont mind typing a bit extra to make code cleaner and more legible 
but I have a few ideas which would reduce needless typing and improve 
clarity at the same time.

(feel free to shoot down any of these ideas)

1. Memory management. Delphi is quite incosistent here by allowing 
component classes to be auto managed (via their owner) whilst 
non-component class have to be manually managed. The best solution I can 
think for this is to reference count non-component classes. This should 
be safe for TObjects but obviously not for Tcomponent descendants (cf 
circular reference problem) so a protected variable could be added to 
TObject to specify whether to ref count it or not (with TComponent 
turning it off). This will improve legibility of code too as there will 
no longer be a need for having loads of try..finally statements to free 
stuff. Backwards compatibility should not be affected so if you call a 
free method it will free it whatever its ref count.

2. For Each. Its in Delphi 2005 and every modern language implements it.

3. Increasing the number of base types to include common stuff like 
lists (Tlist, TStringList). Python does this nicely and theres no reason 
Pascal cant. Base types are dynamically allocated and reference counted 
so theres no need to explicitly create or destroy them. The following 
code would therefore work :

var strlist : Stringlist;
begin
   strlist.add('mystring');
end;

(note I did not use a T in front of StringList so as to distinguish it 
from non-base types and also to maintain backwards compatibility with 
existing code that uses TStringList conventionally)


jamie.