Hi! Am Samstag, den 25.03.2006, 17:19 +0700 schrieb Bisma Jayadi: > > "Foo a"."bar a" := "baz b"[4]."foo q" > > You made a very excessive example. Of course we don't HAVE TO use space char > all > the times. I won't use it that way either. But it's there when we really > want/need it. > > > is harder to read! It's not the char itself, it's that it's used all over > > the > > place whenever this is used. I don't like it. > > Maybe you don't like it and that's alright. This feature won't harm you in > any > ways. But some other people could demand it in some circumstances.
That is wrong. If the possibility exists, it will be used (at least in some cases by some people). In many cases this code will have to be maintained by different people too. There will be guys which can't stand this kind of identifiers but they are forced to use it. So this "feature" renders to a limitation of freedom and productivity of programmers. The proposed idea has big drawbacks: - code gets unreadable and unmaintainable (eye-ball search for mating '"' chars, finding seperations between identifiers) - the linker doesn't support special chars inside variable names so automatic name manging would be necessary - people are stimulated to use identifiers in their natural language instead of short and pregnant keywords - somebody could have the idea to demand Unicode characters inside identifiers, cooperative software development (as widely exercised in Open Source and Free Software development) across different countries and languages comes to a stagnation due to lack of available characters on the programmer's keyboards (or could you write German äöüÄÖÜß, or even Russian cyrillic letters without painful tricks?) - create heavy incompatibilities with Delphi, Turbo Pascal, ... - and finally, a personal argument: The professional programming language Pascal is shifted towards kiddies and wannabe programmers and I personally want to prevent that FreePascal resembles Visual Basic or other language for blowhards. For your game maker application (which is intended for kiddies and wannabies, I guess), do the name mangling in your application and let the compiler and underlying language be a tool for professionals. Bye Hansi _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
