[fpc-pascal] What to do to get new users

[Sven Barth]

Am 16.11.2024 um 16:42 schrieb Marcos Douglas B. Santos via fpc-pascal:
> "anonymous procedures" now
> exist and can also be declared "anywhere";

You didn't get the important part of the feature then. The important 
part is less the anonymous function, but the function reference. That 
you can have a function capture state from within the function and then 
have that state leave the function. Unlike Delphi FPC can also pass 
nested functions to function references, so if you don't like anonymous 
functions you can still benefit from this feature by utilizing nested 
functions together with function references.

> we have Generics because,
> well, Delphi and other languages have them, so we must have them too,
> right?
Wrong. FPC had generics before Delphi. And they allow for typesafe code 
without duplicating the necessary source code for everything. I wouldn't 
want to miss them by a long shot.

> - finally unifying FPC and Lazarus, whether on the FPC website, the
> Lazarus website, or a new one;

FPC and Lazarus are as unified as is sensible. We keep them different by 
*choice* so that users don't think that they *have* to choose Lazarus if 
they don't want to.

> using fpcupdeluxe as the official installation method;

No. The Windows and Linux installers are much more sensible for the 
release versions. FpcUpDeluxe makes sense for development versions or 
for quickly setting up a cross platform compiler for a platform that 
doesn't have an installer.
> - simplifying/deleting most of the libraries that are not used by default;
I agree that most libraries should be moved over to the fppkg repository 
once we get that up and running. But until then we will not remove anything.

> - simplifying the naming conventions of units; using something like
> "lazarus.blablabla" and "fpc.blablabla" and leaving the main system
> units with names without prefixes;

No. That affects backwards compatibility. Not gonna happen. Which is 
also why the 3.4.0 release which will support both non-namespaced and 
namespaced units (for Delphi compatibility) will be available in both 
flavors. At least for the major platforms.


> - how about allowing the same AS in unit declarations so we can do
> something like [unit MyUnitWithABigName AS MyUnit] and then use
> [MyUnit.TSomeClass] — this can already be done with MACROS, so it
> would be simple to implement in the language, right?

That alone shows that you have no clue how the compiler works...

Regards,
Sven