[fpc-pascal] Re: Illogical automatic dereferencing

[Guillermo Martínez Jiménez]

> From: J?rgen Hestermann <juergen.hestermann at gmx.de>
>
> (...) but Borland created these Pascal
> "extensions" and now we cannot go back (as others say) because we need
> compatibility with Delphi programs and an "easier" (which I doubt)
> convertion of C header files. So noone is willing to turn back the clock
> and remove these illogical extensions. Sadly we now have no longer a
> clean language in the spirit of Pascal but a mix of Pascal and C and we
> will have to live with it forever.

That is I mean with "Pascal can evolve", some extensions as
ANSISTRING, ASM ... END, CLASS, etc. makes Pascal better. About the
Delphi compatibility, I think that the "-Mdelphi" compiler option ( or
"{$MODE DELPHI}" as you wish ) was a great idea if that compatibility
is really needed.

I don't see what new stuff is needed for "an easier convertion of C
header files". I'm the author of the Allegro library wrapper (which is
a C library) and I hadn't problems to interface with it (except that
it has a static part and a dynamic part, but it's a different story).
Pascal has data types that can deal with the C data types and the
"CDECL" keyword does help enough.