[fpc-devel] dominant short strings in compiler source

[L505]

I'm really surprised about the amount of short strings used on the FPC compiler source,
such as short strings being used even to pass to Exec() when the linker is called on
windows. This is obviously why for the past few years I've had all sorts of chopped off
issues with FPC and got weird linker messages when using long directory paths. Especially
when I am using the -o option in combination with a bunch of other linker options
(since -o is passed to the linker, along with -K options and other stuff, such
as --include, AFAIK). I'm wondering why short strings were used so dominantly - was it
because FPC 2.0.x is based on old source code base which didn't have ansistrings available
yet? Was it for speed? I don't see how using short strings could significantly improve the
speed on for example an Exec call - I could see it greatly improving speed in some cases -
but when it introduces hard to find bugs, not worth a few milliseconds IMO. And the Pascal
language is supposed to have less bugs in it because of strong typing, but in fact strong
short string typing has really caused me a lot of bizarre bug headache :-)

I've made some efforts to change some stuff to ansistrings to try and solve my bug with -k
option that I mentioned recently - and although I am making progress, I realize that I am
changing TONS of code since tons of the code uses short strings - is there any plan to get
rid of the short string reliance in lots of the code? It will require a HUGE patch on
multiple units. I'm just trying to find out some of your plans on the future FPC versions.
The short string reliance kind of scares me, actually.