[fpc-pascal] Re: Delphi's anonymous functions in Free Pascal

[Jonas Maebe]

On 06 Nov 2011, at 15:13, dmitry boyarintsev wrote:

> Hi-jacking, the thread, and again should FPC chase Delphi forever?

If we want to offer compatibility with source code written for Delphi, which does happen to be one of FPC's project goals, then yes, we do have to do that to some extent.

> Now, FPC has provided support for ObjC interface, and Delphi is using
> that,

Delphi is only using it for iOS (because they don't have their own ARM compiler yet). They are using a different way to interface with Objective-C that does not use the FPC syntax with their Mac OS X compiler. In fact, they reportedly do it without extending the language in any way, by basing it on dynamic dispatch similar to COM interfaces. That in itself is a good argument for not adopting FPC's syntax: if you can do something without extending the language, it's almost always the better option.

> so maybe it will (and should) be otherwise - Delphi is to
> provide syntax support for FPC?

What Delphi /should/ do is a useless discussion on the FPC lists. If you insist on doing it anyway, please move it to fpc-other.


Jonas