[fpc-pascal] About undocumented features

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, fpclist at silvermono.co.za said:
> 
> I would think that some of the above feature had to be introduced into .Net 
> because a (close to) pure OO impementation does not support global vars, 
> global functions etc. as a hybrid language like Object Pascal does.

Java and C#/CLR are usually considered as not pure OO. Pure OO doesn't know
value types. I think most of these were just about scoring bullets on the comparison
list with C#, except "strict var". 

Questions about private visibility have appeared regularly in forums for
years, usually comparing with other languages. I think codegear was simply
tired of the debate and implemented "strict *", for people that want to
micromanage visibility (*)

Afaik Florian did some of the easier later constructs, but be careful, some
might not be complete (only parsed). I recall something of the class
var/const etc also working.

There is to my knowledge no real roadmap, since these things are not driven
by roadmap, but by need. Somebody who wants them spends time on them etc.
Probably the slow progress is because none of these are particularly
exciting, and nearly all public codebases and components are D7 backwards
compatible and thus don't contain these.

(*) something which is IMHO not proper OO, which is about modelling not
about finegrained permission models. What's next, classtypes with ACLs ? :-)