[fpc-devel] Feature announcement: Type helpers

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 6 Feb 2013, Sven Barth wrote:

> Am 06.02.2013 11:03, schrieb Michael Van Canneyt:
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, 6 Feb 2013, Sven Barth wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello Free Pascal community!
>>> 
>>> I'm pleased to announce the addition of type helpers which extend the 
>>> existing helper concept with the ability to extend primitive types.
>> 
>> Haha, finally after 7 years of waiting we catch up with Morfik...
> In how far? I've read about Morfik just now on Wikipedia, but I found nothing 
> referring to something like type helpers, so if you could please elaborate? 
> :)

It does what type helpers do. Only they implemented it by 'refactoring' the code.

By themselves I think they are pretty useless.

The main advantage is in the codetools of the IDE.

With helpers you can do
   i.<ctrl-space>
and get a list of methods, for example ToString;

Which, for newbies, is easier than guessing IntToStr()

We'll have to make some units with 'standard' helpers.

I assume Delphi XE3 has such a unit, we can use that for inspiration.

>> Thank you very much Sven, excellent work ! :-)
> You're welcome. And now I'm going to make Marco happy by further improving 
> generics :)

You might want to look at the bug reported by Ido Kanner ;-)

Michael.