[fpc-devel] dominant short strings in compiler source

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Tue, 16 May 2006, schreef 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.

It is partially historic, but mostly for for performance reasons.  
Shortstrings are really a lot faster than ansistrings, and therefore they 
will continue to be used.

While ansistrings are not really forbidden in the compiler source, there 
has never be a good reason to use ansistrings in a lot of code.

Daniël