[fpc-pascal]Synapse for FPC

[L D Blake]

In reply to your message of July 23, 2003

> If we had a lot of hard working people, we could make a nice new set of 
> platform dependant units, and more and more TP units would become legacy.

This is a truly interesting discussion, I hope you don't mind a few comments
from someone who's just now re-joining the programming game, as retirement
approaches...

On the subject of Strings and on a strictly personal note:

I would prefer a language that is tightly integrated with an OS... so tightly
that OS calls and language calls fit together in one smooth flow. I should not
have to translate strings or use trickery like "A := B+A+#0" or "@A[1]" to get
things to work. OS calls should be so seamless as to appear to be part of the
language, not part of yet another complex bag of tricks that has to be studied
and understood.

I'm not saying you should mask API calls to make them look like Pascal syntax.
Just the opposite, I'm thinking it might be better to bend Pascal to work
better with the OS... Make it natively work with null terminated strings in
windows, give it the same numerical structures as BEOS, support LINUX file
handling in Pascal's normal file handlers, etc.

Source code portability is a wonderful idea, but not at the expense of speed
or power in the language. As a one time professional software developer, I'd
rather write highly specific code that works flawlessly than have to mangle
and mask things to get stuff to work. I do understand the need for
cross-platform developement, especially with Linux nipping at Window's heels
these days... but I would rather have to run a source code converter program
once to switch platforms than to always run string, math and file converters
on the platform I'm using...

Just my 2 cents worth...


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 L D Blake