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

[Marco van de Voort]

> 
> > 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.

Not every syntax is about minimizing code or readability. Some are also
to simply simplify parsing (and that is about compiler developer, but to make
the language more internally consistent) and avoid long lookaheads. These things
combined also improve quality of error messages a lot.

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

For trivial programs: yes. However FPC is not designed for short scripting
programs.
 
> > 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.

See above.