[fpc-devel] Thoughts on being able to declare "pointer-to-type" parameters directly in method signatures?

[Ben Grasset]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 12:15 AM Dmitry Boyarintsev <
skalogryz.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> You've been told before. Variable types are not the same as parameter
> types.
>

That *doesn't matter* in any *practical *sense. How you *used *something
declared as "^Type" would always be the same no matter what context it
appeared in, because it can only ever mean one very specific thing.

I certainly do not need to be "told" anything, by the way.

On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 12:15 AM Dmitry Boyarintsev <
skalogryz.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> The "utterly trivial" is in fact a change to the language syntax.
> Where currently, a parameter is:
>   [modifier] parameter_name [ : [array of] {type_identifier, const}]]
> You're proposing to do it as:
>   [modifier] parameter_name [ : [array of] {[^]type_identifier, const}]]
>
> treating "^" as a special rule to pass a reference to a type (because "^"
> cannot be a part of identifier).
>

So, you're going to keep pretending like you're actually concerned about
maintaining the integrity of some (completely fictional) "traditional"
Pascal (that FPC never has been and was presumably never intended to be),
and implying that arbitrary *syntax diagrams* of all things are
non-trivially relevant to real people writing real Pascal code in real
life? Great, I guess we won't be getting anywhere productive then.

If you or anyone else *actually *cared about that sort of thing at all, FPC
would not do or allow many things that it currently does. Unfortunately,
that would have the nasty side effect of making it a significantly less
useful compiler for an objectively less useful form of the language,
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