[fpc-pascal] TFPGObjectList error

[Jim Lee]

On 07/01/18 01:03, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>
> Can you explain what you think is wrong with or missing in the 
> official documentation ?
> (apart from a search mechanism)
>
> Michael.
>
Well, search is a big one, but there seems to be a lot of missing pieces 
(again, without search it's hard to tell exactly how much is missing).  
There also seems to be a lot of outdated stuff, and most of what I find 
was auto-generated from fpdoc (when? last week or 10 years ago?  no 
timestamps!), with scant (or no) explanation beyond "here is a terse, 
un-commented example".

I haven't found any sort of map or tree that shows how the rtl and fcl 
are organized, or an index that shows which types/functions/classes are 
in which units (that's hugely important).  Basically, I expected to find 
the equivalent of the old Borland programmer's reference manuals.

The most common scenario for me is this: "I wonder if fpc (or Lazarus) 
already has <insert feature here>".  Go to the wiki and browse 
haphazardly, looking for something named similarly.  If that something 
is found, and looks promising, follow link to a half-page of 
"documentation" which is basically just a snippet of the interface 
section in the source.  Then, try to find the referenced module in my 
local source tree and discover that it's not quite the same, or is not 
what I was looking for in the first place.  Rinse and repeat.

I would love to be able to use fpc, as it's pretty much the only game in 
town when it comes to a cross-platform Pascal able to be used for 
low-level, even bare metal programming.  I also realize that 
documentation is often low on the list of priorities - but good 
documentation is vital to build a user base, and bad documentation is 
what drives people away.

-Jim