[fpc-pascal] Illogical automatic dereferencing

[Marco van de Voort]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 02:01:35PM +0200, "Vinzent H?fler" wrote:
> > > 
> > > So technically, C is the one who got it wrong.
> > 
> > Wrong and right are absolute terms.
> 
> Yes. And first mixing arrays with pointers and then telling everybody that
> this is just the same is - wrong. Absolutely. ;)

As said it depends from your viewpoint. C's original viewpoint was to keep
the state of a compilation unit as small as possible, to maximize the size
of a program with limited memory.

One can discuss if it was smart of later languages to promote similar
features, but for C, more crucial requirements prevailed.

And the criticism about introducing Cisms in FPC/Delphi is also old. In the
past I would have joined you, but after a few non-trivial header conversions
and library conversions that pretty much died out.

In 1.0.x times headers were often "pascalized", but if you have answered
several tens of bugreports where people converted a C example and pass a
pointer to a formal parameter, you get tired of it. Likewise you also get
tired when you need to update some header (or code like zlib,jpeg) and have
to guess what the purpose and consequences of some pascallization are.