[fpc-other] Re: [fpc-pascal] Pascal dialect -- was: Re: fpc-pascal Digest, Vol 72, Issue 12

[Jonas Maebe]

On 04 Jun 2010, at 12:54, spir wrote:

> I'm surprised of this, fpc still systematically trying to follow Delphi, after so many years.

In some ways we follow Delphi (mostly language features), in other ways Delphi follows us (e.g. platform support). Delphi and FPC are part of the same ecosystem. We're not trying to replace Delphi, show them the one true way, or anything like that.

> I can understand that at the beginning the fpc team needed to mostly comply with Delphi, as de facto object pascal standard.

You're saying that as if a standard is a bad thing. Standards, de fact or otherwise, are good. It helps with reusing knowledge, sharing code and avoiding a proliferation of ad hoc features that result in a mess that can no longer be unentangled.

As an aside, in the early days we were in fact a lot less strict in following Borland than we are today.

> But then, fpc could live its own life, possibly taking the best of Delphi's innovations, but not having as main goal to be always running after it.

The main goal is implementing stuff we care about. If Delphi already implemented something similar, then unless there is an extremely good reason for doing things differently, it is stupid to implement it in a different way simply because "you don't want to follow Delphi":
* you waste time reinventing the wheel
* you waste time adding support for the Delphi-compatible way later on
* you waste other people's time because they have to relearn the feature and/or maintain two different code bases
* you risk making mistakes in the design that Borland avoided (as I've mentioned many times already on the mailing list, we've had to revert many "we do this different than Borland because they implemented useless and stupid limitations" language features over the years because our "improved" version suffered from flaws we didn't realise at first)

> so why not having already made the step of declaring fpc a (object) Pascal dialect of its own?

We have. It's called ObjFPC mode. And another one is called Objective-Pascal mode. But that's not the point. Our main goal is not to design languages. Our main goal is to let people program on Object Pascal on any platform they want (well: on any platform that people add and maintain support for in FPC).


Jonas