[fpc-pascal] TFPGObjectList error

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sun, 1 Jul 2018, Jim Lee wrote:

>
>
> 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 There also seems to be a lot of outdated stuff, and most of what I find 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".

The documentation is brought up to date at every release: all new
identifiers are documented and the documentation regenerated.
If you look in the bugtracker, you will see that I regularly fix
documentation issues.

If you think it is too terse in places, please report them in the
bugtracker. I will always fix all such reports.

>
> 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.

It is all there, user's guide, language reference, programmer's guide,
Reference to *all* rtl units. What do you think is missing ?

See https://www.freepascal.org/docs.var

index:
RTL: https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/rtl/index-8.html
FCL: https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/fcl/index-8.html


>
> 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 don't know what documentation you are referring to, but as said, all basic
RTL units, and selected FCL units  are documented:
https://www.freepascal.org/docs.var

Packages are another story. I checked the packages. There are roughly 16.000 classes.
I didn't count methods/functions, but they surely are a multiple of that.
There is 1 documenter: me.

I have toyed with the idea to run fpDoc on all packages, and put the result
online, so people can at least have a look in the index to see what's
available.,

Feel free to chip in.

Michael.