[fpc-devel] {$I %LINE%} and friends

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Hans-Peter Diettrich said:
> I wonder why FPC broke Delphi compatibility by adding {$MODE}, instead 
> of choosing its own prefix for added compiler directives and macros.

FPC might not have been that Delphi compatible when this was introduced. 

IIRC mode FPC is the oldest, then the mode concept was developed because of
some extremely unportable TP features, like the 16-bit array
indexing wrap, absolute with 16-bit addresses? Specially the former could
also impact performance (inserted instructions on every array access)

Then ObjFPC evolved, and only then Delphi.

In the beginning the idea was to have an totally own oo dialect, but the
number of people that worked on it continuously was low and they did burn
out fast leaving half finished stuff. 

Btw selecting own prefixes is dangerous. Most logical ones have been in use
for some external macro or documentation system sooner or later, or some or
the other compiler reacts to them.  (e.g.  & is used by VP iirc)