[fpc-devel] "Blank slate" next version of FPC

[Henry Vermaak]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 09:47:20AM -0300, Marcos Douglas B. Santos
wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 8:32 AM Henry Vermaak
> <henry.vermaak at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm mostly more interested in limiting the scope to prevent
> > accidental use, like you.  It can also offer more fine grained
> > control of where managed variables get freed.
> 
> Try to see restrictions as a good thing.  In this case, which Pascal
> doesn't allow to declare inline variables, you must split big
> functions, which has many local variables, in others to have a better
> understanding of the algorithm. At the end, you might have a better
> design and reuse of the code. Everybody wins: you, your code, Pascal
> team - as they don't need to change the compiler - and Niklaus Wirth
> might not throw a curse in us.

I don't have many big functions and I've missed scoped variables in
Pascal since the early 1990s.  It's been standard good practice in
software engineering for decades and all the languages I work with
support it because it's a good idea, not because it's some newfangled
fad.

But big functions happen in the real world.  The fpc compiler source has
dozens of extremely long functions.  Lazarus too.  I think the windproc
function in the win32 interface is more than 700 lines (look at
TWindowProcHelper.DoWindowProc).

Henry