[fpc-pascal] Please someone explain this to me

[Andreas Schneider]

Am 2016-02-14 12:42, schrieb Jürgen Hestermann:
> Here we differ:
> I expect that a documentation *fully* explains
> a behaviour of a certain function (or something else),
> not just some part of it.

IMHO that would be insane. To a programmer (like you and me) the RTL and 
the Compiler are just interfaces. Therefore the documentation describes 
the contract. I need not and should not need to know the inner workings. 
All I need to know is the required inputs to get a specific output.
The more of the internals you guarantee, the less you can change later 
on which might even make platform portability impossible.

Look for example at Java. You rarely found details about the JVM. If you 
do, they are from "hackers", in blogs or the like. Oracle doesn't 
guarantee you how the interfaces (RTL) are implemented. There are 
certain constraints every RTL implementation has to fulfill and they are 
documented. The rest is open to the one implementing it. And in reality 
there are indeed quite a lot differences. The HotSpot VM works different 
from JRockit which again works much different from IBMs implementations.

So again - in my opinion - internals are best left out of documentation. 
Therefore *fully* explaining the behavior would be wrong.

Best regards,
Andreas