[fpc-devel] New language feature suggestion (probably not existing in Delphi)

[Max Vlasov]

Hi,

I thought about OOP recently, as many sometimes wonder that it's not as good
as it can be in some areas. For example, the OOP encapsulation is good, but
sometimes the developer doesn't track the context completely or makes other
"bad" things related to the hidden nature of encapsulation context. The
notion of name the variables with "f" at the start also speaks itself about
these problems.

An idea here is to introduce a directive (maybe something else, but
directive looks more straightforward), let's call it readonly that forces
the method to be able only to read the fields and properties of the object
it belongs to and forbid any writing. Sure in this case it only can call
only the methods also containing such directive.

One of example of possible usage: TBitmap contains PixelFormat, when user
changes it, there should be a conversion, but to be more sure that it will
be accurate and there are no side effects I'd mark the method for conversion
with this directive so it will only read existing properties and create some
new one to return in variable passed by reference. With this directive on,
any attempt of this method to change the fields related to bits or handle
will be stopped by the compiler, also if it tries to call a read/write
method, the compiler will also stops. There are others examples that come to
mind, all allowing oop programming to be more controlled.

I thing there might be some logical contradictions I'm not aware at the
moment, but I think they can be resolved with general oop inheritance logic.

What do you think? Is anyone aware of similar concept in any other OOP
language? Apart from the idea (worth it or not), there's also a question
about introducing brand-new features in fpc. Are developers (read "Florian"
:) is open to introducing new features that later possible other parties
(read Embarcadero :) will be willing to adapt?


Thanks,

Max Vlasov
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-devel/attachments/20101126/7a8ebebc/attachment.html>