[fpc-pascal] Illogical automatic dereferencing

[Mattias Gärtner]

Zitat von Florian Klaempfl <florian at freepascal.org>:

> Jürgen Hestermann schrieb:
>>
>> Yes, but you cannot avoid it, if you work with dynamic arrays. You are
>> not even told that it's a pointer. That's just the problem.

Same for classes and strings. Classes are pointers and I'm happy that  
I can write A.B instead of A^.B.

About pointer arithmetic:
IMO memory is an array. So for me it is quite natural that P^ and P[0]  
are the same. I think this is a great feature of FPC, which I don't  
want to miss. It's simple, unambiguous and readable - like pascal.

The only disturbing is the automatic dereferencing of pointer to  
record/object in Delphi mode, where you can use PtrRect^.Left and  
PtrRect.Left.
But that only works in delphi mode, which I avoid.


> The problem is that one is playing with stuff he doesn't understand.
> Explict use of pointers is always dangerous and one should really know
> what he does especially on object pascal dyn. arrays which are much more
> than a simply pointer to the data else one wrecks anyways havoc.

Great power comes with great responsibility.

Mattias