[fpc-pascal] FPImage and GetDataLineStart

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be said:
> > class for each storage type and deal with delegation overhead.
> >
> > I've complete understanding for the fact that generics are too early, but
> > IMHO it is the long term solution. Anything else would be madness, or minor
> > damage control at best.
> 
> Most of the more "recent" or "new" languages I know do not have generics, 

What do you mean, C++,C#, Java ? 

> which puts a question mark beside the 'long term' and 'madness'. 
> One could argue that generics itself is "damage control", on a language level, 
> for the "old languages" to alleviate the restrictions of strict typing.

It eases some cases where that strictness hurts. There are multiple
solutions for such cases, e.g. in the database world, people went for
variants.  Generics are typically for cases where the types are
parameterizable.
 
> Generics in FPC are a typing aid, borrowed from C++, no more, no less. 
> This is an old discussion, which I will not repeat.

> So please stop using nice sounding one-liners like 'madness' and "long-term
> solutions", "damage control". They are highly subjective and therefore of 
> no value, as they only put your beliefs against mine.

They are as subjective as a one person mandated ban on generics. Even long
term.

> willing to work on it. I did the bulk of the design and maintenance in 
> the past, I'll handle this as well.
> So you can cooperate with me and propose solutions that I'm willing to implement
> and spend time on,

I see no workable solution at this moment. So I'll wait what you have to
offer, and see if it matches my own. Otherwise I'll see if I can create some
parallel bae library, but that has to wait till generics on FPC are more
mature.