[fpc-pascal] Generic type conflicts

[Sven Barth]

Am 07.11.2019 um 01:33 schrieb Ben Grasset via fpc-pascal:
> On Wed, Nov 6, 2019 at 12:44 PM Sven Barth via fpc-pascal 
> <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org 
> <mailto:fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org>> wrote:
>
>     Pascal has a strong type safety, thus something like the
>     if-expression won't be used/allowed to weaken that.
>
>     If that means that some things can't be implemented in generics
>     the "easy" way, then so be it.
>
>
> I agree that Pascal has strong type safety.
>
> IMO conditional branching based on compile-time constant evaluation, 
> that cannot fail, does not do anything resembling weakening it, however.
>
> It strengthens it, and has no downsides, because it's verified by the 
> compiler.
>
> Encouraging typecasting (which cares only about the sizes of the types 
> involved, nothing else) at the programmer level is far more 
> error-prone in a variety of ways.
If there is no type checking, then it is *not* verified by the compiler. 
If I have an if-expression with an always true if-clause I could write 
any syntactically correct garbage in the else-clause if type checking 
would be disabled, because the compiler would not verify it. And this is 
not how Pascal works. And also not how FPC's parser works. We're taking 
huge care that generics are correctly type checked and that as many 
errors as possible are caught when writing the generic (instead of when 
specializing), so we're not going to introduce something like this. The 
if-expression is intended to be like C/C++'s ternary operator nothing 
more, nothing less cause that is what most people want to use it for.

Regards,
Sven
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