[fpc-devel] Re: [fpc-l] type discussion

[Vinzent Hoefler]

On Thursday 02 June 2005 14:44, Jamie McCracken wrote:

> My point is to to reduce or remove *redundant* syntax that serves no
> useful or productive purpose (to the programmer).

Well applied redundancy is a good thing.

> Forward declarations are redundant - they exist purely for the
> benefit of the compiler.

IBTD.

> Begin..End is redundant - you have to indent them to make em readable
> anyways.

No. This makes the code more readable like normal english text. It 
states much more clearly what it intents, at least much more than just 
indenting or putting curly braces around it.

> manual memory management of tobjects is redundant as you can get good
> performance with ref counting tobjects.

That can be a point, yes. But it is somehow not related to any syntax.

> All in all the changes would mean you spend more of your time
> implementing your application rather than typing loads of redundant
> code.

Typing is only a very small part of the development cycle. Performance 
measures indicate that rhe average programmer delivers about 2 to 20 
lines per code per day (measured over the whole development cycles, 
this of course includes testing, too).

Compare these with the lines of code you *could* write in eight hours if 
you would just write them and you see how much you could optimize away 
there if you'd actually manage to double the performance.

> Maintenance is easier as their is less redundancy.

It simply depends on the kind of redundancy.

For instance, "type" and "var" keywords are just redundant, the compiler 
could figure it out by itself, still they serve a useful purpose.


Vinzent.

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