[fpc-pascal] Read lines into UnicodeString variable from UCS2 (UTF-16) encoded text file

Tomas Hajny XHajT03 at hajny.biz
Mon Sep 16 07:06:41 CEST 2019


On 2019-09-16 03:21, DougC wrote:
> In my view that's exactly what a procedure is for: Accept some
> parameters, do some processing, store some data elsewhere, return some
> results via parameters.
> 
> Functions, on the other hand, should be more limited. Accept some
> data, perform one function, return one result, having no side effects.
> 
> Other languages like everything to be functions which is where the
> predilection toward them comes from. The worst form of this is
> functions that have side effects, return one result, but then also
> return additional results via parameters. Arrgghh!

The most common use case for this function would be checking the call 
result and doing something based on this result. From this point of view 
it's much more logical to make it a function than requiring another 
temporary variable as the parameter and performing the decision based on 
value returned in this parameter, especially if the return value is 
boolean.

Tomas



> ---- On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 18:59:51 -0400 Tomas Hajny
> <mailto:XHajT03 at hajny.biz> wrote ----
> 
> 
> On 2019-09-16 00:29, DougC wrote:
>> But to fully correct the situation, I would also change it to a
>> procedure since leaving it as a function still suggests it only
>> returns a result and has no other side effects.
> 
> No, changing it to a procedure would not work - the information whether
> BOM was found and thus the codepage in the text file record was set
> accordingly, or whether the information was not available, is very
> important for further processing (as an example, the programmer may ask
> the end user to provide information about the text file encoding in 
> such
> a case). Purely from technical point of view, it would be possible to
> change it to a procedure and move the return value to a new actual
> parameter, but it doesn't make much sense from my point of view.


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