[fpc-devel] FPC Delphi compatibility question...

[Jonas Maebe]

On 19 Jun 2009, at 13:21, Florian Klaempfl wrote:

> Jonas Maebe schrieb:
>>
>> On 19 Jun 2009, at 12:01, Maxim Egorov wrote:
>>
>>> It's not true in the case of functions that return dynamic arrays,
>>> strings or interfaces. Because of these types require special
>>> finalization and they must be initialized to nil by default.
>>
>> That is an implementation detail, and not something you can rely on  
>> as
>> far as semantics are concerned.
>
> Variables of those types are initialized to nil at scope entry. I'd
> consider result as variable.

Yes, but as far as I am concerned that is an implementation detail  
(it's done because otherwise you get crashes when assigning something  
to such variables due to the way the garbage collection is  
implemented). This means that if you have an undefined value, the  
compiler should be free to replace this undefined value with whatever  
it wants (since the result is semantically undefined anyway, why not  
make it as efficient as possible?).


Jonas