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

[Henry Vermaak]

On 4 June 2010 19:37, Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4 June 2010 19:51, Jonas Maebe wrote:
>>
>> As I said in the mail you replied to (first paragraph I wrote): FPC and Delphi
>> are part of the same ecosystem. If you keep looking at it as if it is about
>> "us versus them", you will probably remain unhappy forever with how
>> FPC evolves, because it will always seem as if we are doing various things
>>  out of servitude to Embarcadero and its horde of evil Delphi users.
>
> Maybe you haven't noticed, but neither Borland, CodeGear or now
> Embarcadero gives a toss about Free Pascal. They see it as a
> competitive compiler, hence the reason they are getting there act
> together now, and implementing missing feature. Also why they are
> implementing their own versions of a cross-platform compiler, instead
> of working with Free Pascal and reusing it for non-Windows platforms.
>
> There is *no* relationship between Embarcadero and Free Pascal. The
> FPC core team might think otherwise, but they are the only ones that
> think that.
>
> If there was any relationship between the two compilers, then
> Embarcadero (f**k I hate that long name) could very easily have
> implemented Generics in the syntax FPC came up with first, but no,
> they had to break the compatibility - for their gain, so FPC needs to
> play catch-up again or be told they are incompatible. Generics is just
> one such example.
>
> You are living a dream if you think they care about FPC, so why the
> hell care about them. FPC is a good product, you don't need Delphi (or
> delphi compatibility) when you have FPC.

I can understand where you are coming from, but there are massive
advantages for developers in keeping compatibility with Delphi.  If a
developer wants to switch from Delphi, he comes with a lot of
experience with Delphi classes and components, so something with that
compatibility will save a huge amount of time.

What FPC and lazarus does is making the delphi knowledge portable.
It's not just the language.  With subtle differences, people will
spend hours lost in documentation and give up.  With fpgui and mseide
it takes me really long to do what I need to, since I haven't got the
experience and knowledge of the classes, no wonder those communities
are small.

I'm afraid that without delphi compatibility, fpc will probably also
shrink to almost nothing.

Henry