[fpc-devel] Macro Processing

[Joerg Schuelke]

Am Sat, 14 May 2011 16:29:15 +0200 (CEST)
schrieb Daniël Mantione <daniel.mantione at freepascal.org>:

> ... will cause 52 bytes of RTTI data to be inserted in your
> executable. Any do-it-yourself solution will consume more space.
> Therefore the RTTI not only helps to keep the source code compact and
> therefore readable, it would also help to keep the compiler exe
> compact.
> 
> So use of RTTI information inside the compiler is most welcome :)

I think of this a little different. Maybe more from an other
perspective. For me RTTI is a level of language extension. Like OOP, or
generics, or inheritance. Macros are very low level (if you have them).

It is not that I think that I would use a macro instead under all
circumstances. But it should be possible to do it without RTTI which is
of higher level in the language.

The principle is do not use it if you do not like it. That should not
influence the rest of the language. This way I think that it is not
that bad to have a small, but powerful macro expander incorporated.

52 bytes of data. And the RTTI code? What if you do not smartlink?

I repeat, I have really nothing against RTTI, but I state that it
comes from a high level language extension.

Regards
	Jörg