The reason for the proposal to add a dynamic/runtime version of
Low/High/Succ/Pred is pretty simply:
Currently there simply is no dynamic/runtime version of it.
Thus any code which is written using low/high/succ/pred is static in nature,
when the code needs to be changed to dynamic it's likely that this will
cause problems.
The problems are a bit vague, perhaps even hard to spot, correct and
understand, I am not going to examine these problems in detail right now,
but these problems probably exist.
All that is needed to fix these problems is a dynamic version of these
methods. But then again this might require even more work to have dynamic
integer types/ranges as well to complement/support it.
I'll shall try to give one example of a potential problem:
Situation 1:
type
Tvalue = 0..5000;
var
vIndex : TValue;
vA : TValue;
vB : TValue;
for Index := Low(TValue) to High(TValue) do
begin
if vA = High(TValue) then
begin
vA := Low(TValue);
end else
begin
vA := Succ(vA);
end;
end;
^ This is a real world example and will probably compile just fine or
perhaps with a few correction.
Now suppose the Tvalue can no longer be static and must be changed to
dynamic, a choice could be made to turn this into a smallint like so:
TValue = smallint
Suddenly this changes the range of low, high, succ, pred.
At runtime the real range is set, for example to 32000.
This breaks all the code, the wrap backs will be wrong, the vA will go out
of range and will go to 32768 and perhaps even wrap back to negative.
Typecasts might also add to the problem, not sure about that.
Thus by simply changing the "ranged" static Tvalue to a more "open range"
static integer type a whole can of worms/problems is opened.
These problems could be more easily solved if Low/High/Succ/Pred was more
dynamic in nature and could adept to the runtime change.
Bye,
Skybuck.
_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - [email protected]
http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
