[fpc-devel] Code is clean now, but how about documentation?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 6 Oct 2008, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> In our previous episode, Tom Verhoeff said:
> > I don't want to wake up sleeping dogs, but while updating various slides
> > to base them on FreePascal/Lazarus instead of Delphi, I found that
> > some documentation that I had copied from the Delphi Help years ago
> > (probably version 6 or so), is literally the same in the FreePascal
> > RTL documentation.
>  
> > In this particular case, it concerns the text for the String function
> > Delete:
> > 
> >   Delete removes Count characters from string S, starting at position
> >   Index.  All characters after the deleted characters are shifted Count
> >   positions to the left, and the length of the string is adjusted.
> > 
> > It is word for word exactly the same in the current FPC RTL reference.

Given that I didn't even own or use Delphi at the time the system unit was 
first documented, this is strange news indeed. 

In each case:
The documentation has been hand-written from scratch, always in the 
'joe' editor, starting on a 486 machine exclusively running linux version 1.x
something (As some core members may remember, the machine was called tflily)
many years ago when I just did the Linux port. The editing has always been 
done on a linux machine. Copy & Paste from a TP or Delphi manual or help file 
is excluded, unless performed by someone else than me: there have been some 
minor contributions over the years - but they are rare, considering the more 
than 2000 pages. A few bigger exceptions aside, I couldn't even say which ones 
or remember the last contribution.

Michael.