[fpc-devel] dominant short strings in compiler source

[L505]

> > We wouldn't have to use sysutils yet.. we could make a custom Dos unit
> > which used "longstrings" instead of short strings, but keep the old
> > Dos unit for compatibility..
>
> This still means that someone has to finish and test longstring
> support in the compiler, and create this longstring Dos unit for all
> platforms. That's more work than it may seem, and partly wasteful
> since Dos is only a legacy compatibility unit.
>
> > In fact, not all the shortstrings would have to be changed to long
> > strings. Just some
> > path related ones.
>
> As I've said already many times in this thread: of course only path-
> related stuff has to be changed in the compiler.

I'm happy with current compiler because all I have to do is change several of my paths to
a bit of a shorter path - it's not a big deal if you know this is an issue that you have
to deal with. So now that the bug is known, I could live with it for really another 10
years. The important part is knowing this bug so I can work around it - if I hadn't
figured this out I would have blamed all my problems on myself. Maybe it was GNU's fault,
or someone elses.. but now I know what causes it.

Longstring is not a feature that needs to be implemented this minute - just like
templates/generics don't really need to be implemented this minute.. it's just a cool
feature that has some advantages. What I wanted to clarify was that a longstring is not
utter useless and does have some advantages, unless my reasoning is flawed.