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

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Michael Van Canneyt said:
> 
> 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.

(see e.g. also the number of Delphi compatibility bugs reported. This is
quite a high percentage)
 
> 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 porting 3rd party delphi code.

> 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.

Yes. THat is also the big flaw in Graeme's reasoning. The fact that porting
will never be 100% perfect is no reason to abandon the possibility
completely.

This is very visible in 1.0.x vs 2.x. With 1.0.x usage of Delphi code was
very low, with 2.x it is much, much higher.

A lot of it are relative benign things. But a lot of benign things make
porting large codebases difficult.