[fpc-pascal] howto find alternatives for deprecated fucntions?

Marco van de Voort marcov at stack.nl
Wed Sep 16 21:03:01 CEST 2015


In our previous episode, Klaus Hartnegg said:
> if the docs and the compiler say that a function is deprecated, how can 
> I find out which other function should be used instead?

Reading release manifests?

http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.4.0#Almost_all_old_1.0.x_socket_unit_functions_have_been_removed
 
Specially the major versions often have loads of this kind of useful info.
We can't keep all legacy considerations in the docs forever.

> Example: www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/sockets/accept.html says that 
> accept is deprecated. Whould I switch to fpaccept eventhough that can do 
> a lot less?  I hope that Sock2Text works there as well.

The socket functions were the OS functions for networking but overloaded for
the sock2text related calls.  That overlated "text" functionality is the
"different functionality" the above message speaks of.

Note that these functions were essentially deprecated in spring 2004, before
deprecated existed, let alone the text option that Graeme mention.

If I had had my way, the whole shebang would have been removed in 2.0.0, but
that was deemed to drastic. 

> In an ideal world every occurance of the word deprecated in the docs 
> would be accompanied by the info which is the alternative.

In an ideal world people would have updated code that used these functions
in 2005 when 2.0 came out :-)
 
Documentation is not meant to preserve a history of every change every made,
specially when the flaws are older than the docs (and compiler) tooling.



More information about the fpc-pascal mailing list