[fpc-devel] Some thoughts on multi-line string support, and a possible syntax that I think is perfectly clean and Pascal-ish.

[Ben Grasset]

On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 4:50 PM <wkitty42 at windstream.net> wrote:

> one person's PrettyPrint format is another's ugly-as-sin ;)
>

One last thing: this is generally, as far as I'm concerned, a nitpicky
non-reason to exclude a useful feature when you consider the simple fact
that anyone who thinks Pascal code at large, in the wild, has any kind of
consistent formatting is kidding themselves.

Even FPC, which uses a not-seen-anywhere else GCC-alike style that I can
absolutely live with despite the fact that I'm not really a fan of it, does
not manage to follow it consistently. The compiler sources are full of
files that mix tabs and spaces despite the fact that AFAIK only spaces are
ever supposed to be used. There's also a large number of places where
you'll find stuff like one-space indentation that makes begin and ends not
line up properly, and such. My diff against the trunk version of
"scanner.pas" for example appears as though it changes far more than it
really does, because while I tried to follow the "FPC style" down to the
letter, the fact that various bits of surrounding code did NOT follow it
properly made detection of unrelated "changes" unavoidable.

TLDR: In my perfect world, all Pascal code everywhere would be written
strictly according to the "Borland Style Guide". I am fully aware that this
is not reality, however, and that it never will be, and so I resign myself
to the fact that it *does not actually matter that much.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-devel/attachments/20190706/f7fa97d6/attachment.html>