[fpc-pascal] My favourite missing feature

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

There seem to be a number of people currently making outrageous 
suggestions about missing features or how FPC could best be repackaged 
and promoted, so since it's the season of good will I trust that folk 
will tolerate this one from me.

There's been a recent thread in fpc-other on second languages, but it 
appeared to focus more on what was a useful part of a developer's 
skillset rather than what people miss from Pascal.

What /I/ miss is Perl's pattern matching, and I miss it to the extent 
that in some of my own scripting stuff I've implemented it myself:

IF cells[2, dateTime] = /(\d\d)\/(\d\d)\/((\d\d)?\d\d)\s.*/i THEN BEGIN
   cells[6, 1]:= /1/ + ordinalSuffix(/1/);
   cells[7, 1]:= monthName(/2/);
   IF /3/ > 999 THEN
     cells[8, 1]:= /3/
   ELSE
     cells[8, 1]:= '20' + /3/
END;

I knew nobody'd like it- I'll get my coat.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, everybody :-)

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]