[fpc-pascal] Pascal dialect -- was: Re: fpc-pascal Digest, Vol 72, Issue 12

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2010, spir wrote:

> On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:50:06 +0200
> Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Borland and Embarcadero jumps off
>> the cliff - FPC must now also jump off the cliff. :)
>
> Hello, Graeme!
>
> I'm surprised of this, fpc still systematically trying to follow Delphi,
> after so many years.  I can understand that at the beginning the fpc team
> needed to mostly comply with Delphi, as de facto object pascal standard. 
> But then, fpc could live its own life, possibly taking the best of
> Delphi's innovations, but not having as main goal to be always running
> after it.  Fpc anyway has done different choices for some features
> (including choices of non-implementation), so why not having already made
> the step of declaring fpc a (object) Pascal dialect of its own?

To many people inside and outside the FPC team, a high degree of Delphi 
compatibility is a must. For a simple reason: reuse of existing Delphi
code, of which there is infinitely more than FPC code.

Do not forget that component creators must maintain their code for older
version of delphi. That means that they cannot use the 'newer' features 
of Delphi anyway and so they don't mind if we don't have all of the latest.
And usage shows that there still is a very large amount of D7 out there, so
it's unlikely to change anytime soon.

And to be honest, I think we do a very good job of it. Yes, we don't have
100% compatibility. But no, it's never 100%. But it is certainly good 
enough to satisfy most people that need it.

Michael.