[fpc-devel] space char inside identifier's name

[Johann Glaser]

Hi!

Am Samstag, den 25.03.2006, 17:19 +0700 schrieb Bisma Jayadi:
> > "Foo a"."bar a" := "baz b"[4]."foo q"
> 
> You made a very excessive example. Of course we don't HAVE TO use space char all 
> the times. I won't use it that way either. But it's there when we really 
> want/need it.
> 
> > is harder to read! It's not the char itself, it's that it's used all over the 
> > place whenever this is used. I don't like it.
> 
> Maybe you don't like it and that's alright. This feature won't harm you in any 
> ways. But some other people could demand it in some circumstances.

That is wrong. If the possibility exists, it will be used (at least in
some cases by some people). In many cases this code will have to be
maintained by different people too. There will be guys which can't stand
this kind of identifiers but they are forced to use it. So this
"feature" renders to a limitation of freedom and productivity of
programmers.

The proposed idea has big drawbacks:
 - code gets unreadable and unmaintainable (eye-ball search for mating
   '"' chars, finding seperations between identifiers)
 - the linker doesn't support special chars inside variable names so
   automatic name manging would be necessary
 - people are stimulated to use identifiers in their natural language
   instead of short and pregnant keywords
 - somebody could have the idea to demand Unicode characters inside
   identifiers, cooperative software development (as widely exercised in
   Open Source and Free Software development) across different countries
   and languages comes to a stagnation due to lack of available
   characters on the programmer's keyboards (or could you write German
   äöüÄÖÜß, or even Russian cyrillic letters without painful tricks?)
 - create heavy incompatibilities with Delphi, Turbo Pascal, ...
 - and finally, a personal argument: The professional programming
   language Pascal is shifted towards kiddies and wannabe programmers
   and I personally want to prevent that FreePascal resembles Visual
   Basic or other language for blowhards.

For your game maker application (which is intended for kiddies and
wannabies, I guess), do the name mangling in your application and let
the compiler and underlying language be a tool for professionals.

Bye
  Hansi