[fpc-pascal] Constants in generics

[Ryan Joseph]

> On Nov 28, 2018, at 7:26 PM, Sven Barth via fpc-pascal <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
> 
> Because that is not supposed to work. Generic routines are *routines*, not types. You can't define aliases for routines either, not to mention the problems with scoping as generic methods exist as well. 

It seems natural you could specialize a generic procedure because you can do this for all other generic types. Maybe a type isn’t the right way but it feels like there should be some way to specialize the procedure header outside of a begin/end block. I know you can't make aliases to procedures but generics are more of “instantiating a template” which falls outside the scope the language in general.

> 
> Generic routines however have a different boon in Delphi that I plan to add as well: inference of the type parameters based on the parameters the user passed. In that case the type parameter clause as well as the "specialize" in non-Delphi modes would not need to be used and it would look like a normal, non-generic call. 

That’s probably the best way (Swift does this and I always wondered why FPC doesn’t) but it won’t work unless the parameters contain the generic parameter, which is a minority of generics functions anyways.
 
Just to be sure, you mean like this?

generic procedure DoThis<T>(msg:T);
begin
end;

begin
	
	DoThis(‘hello’); // compiles as “specialize DoThis<string>(‘hello’)” because param types match generic parameter types

If all that’s involved is comparing params types to generic types then that looks like a relatively simple solution.  Const generic params may have complicated this some however.

Regards,
	Ryan Joseph