[fpc-pascal] Subclassing generic records?

[Sven Barth]

Am 21.07.2017 23:36 schrieb "Ryan Joseph" <ryan at thealchemistguild.com>:
>
> Thanks Sven, that’s one way around it.
>
> So is it by design that records don’t have inheritance or is this planned?

Yes, that's by design and there are no plans to change this.

> and is it also by design that classes don’t allow operator overloads
inside them? That seems like an omission since the way they’re implemented
in records is much nicer imo.

There are two points you need to be aware of to understand why thinks are
the way they are:
First of global operator overloads were the first that were implemented in
FPC. Then Delphi came along and added record operator overloads, because
they needed them for generics. FPC followed, cause the global overloads are
useless in that case.
Secondly even for global operator overloads classes are not really that
suitable, cause in complex expressions (let's say "a * (b + c)") you'll
have the generation of temporary variables (in the example the result of "b
+ c"), but the compiler can't know whether it's really a temporary value
that it can free after the whole expression is handled or whether merely
the instance that had been passed in (let's say "b") had been modified and
passed as a result. Thus operator overloads for classes can easily lead to
memory leaks or other hard to debug problems. Yes, that's already possible
with global operators as well, but with operators that are part of the
class that would be much more inviting.

Regards,
Sven
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