[fpc-devel] [fpc-announce] FPC 3.2.0 released!

[Keith Bowes]

Je 2020-06-20 je 12:03:58 (+0200) Marco van de Voort skribis:
> 
> Finally, the Free Pascal 3.2.0 release is available from our servers and
> from sourceforge.
> 

I've been playing around a little with it.  So far, so good.  It
compiles as fast as ever and the generated binaries are much smaller
than with 3.0.4.  It's little wonder why Pascal is my go-to language
when writing something (unfortunately, I have to use primarily C and
Python when sending patches for existing projects).

I was really hoping that ISO 10206 support would be able to make it into
3.2, but there were significant roadblocks.  For one, for the Bind
function to be correctly implemented, I'm pretty sure file I/O would
have to be rewritten to allow Bind to know whether a file could be
successfully opened or not.  Another thing was the Card function, which
I thought would be easy to do, as surely the code keeps track of how
many elements there are in a set, but if it does, I couldn't find it.
It just occurred to me right now that a possible hack could be to create
such a function in the extpas unit using a for..in loop, but that would
perform very badly compared to compiler code.

I'll probably get back into it eventually, but I might have to redo what
I've already done, because conflicts in the Makefiles are pretty much a
certainty.  Personally, I'm nut sure why the Makefiles are included in
SVN; they should be generated `fpcmake -r` before compilation (or being
packed into a source tarball) to avoid this kind of thing.

Anyway, it'll be nice if we can get some more ISO 10206 features.  Some
have been popping up here and there over the years (string slices, the
** operator, WriteStr/ReadStr, etc), but a lot of useful features are
missing and seemingly have no equivalent in Borland's proprietary
dialect.