[fpc-devel] Templates / Generics

[Peter Vreman]

>> - instantiation will be only possible in declaration blocks, not in code
>> blocks:
>> possible:
>> var
>>   mylist : TList<integer>;
>> const
>>   mylist : TList<integer> = nil;
>> type
>>   mylist = TList<integer>;
>> forbidden:
>> procedure p(mylist : TList<integer>);
>> begin
>>   ...
>>   mylist:=TList<integer>.create;
>>   ...
>> end;
>
> This seems like a smart and sufficient solution to avoid the problem of
> parsing < tokens in code blocks.
>
> On the other hand, programmers will like it (a lot) more if they don't
> need to separately define a type for every generic instantiation. Is the
> token-lookahead approach proposed elsewhere in this thread not a
> sufficient solution? If it is not very easy, or if we are quite unsure
> about this for now, perhaps we can postpone the implementation of
> in-code(block) generic instantiation to a later time and first implement
> generics as above.

The token-lookahead is a hack and will create more problems and
performance loss in a critical part of the compiler.

The restriction of type blocks only is not strange at all, Delphi allows
'class of' is also only in type blocks