I'm aware of the term "lazy programmer", and to say I suffer from lazy
programmer syndrome was still insulting because I pride myself on
checking edge cases and making sure my code was thorough and robust (and
if I overlook something in particular, I'll gladly have it pointed out
so it can be fixed). Up until now, there was nothing to say that
omitting an *else* branch in a *case* block was lazy programming - for
all I knew, it made sense because it clearly implied that you wanted
nothing special to happen if none of the branches match - but to have
the rules changed and the accusation applied retroactively was a grave
insult. Also, I don't drink, smoke or do drugs, and I absolutely abhor
swearing, but you don't need to hear my life story. Still, I apologise
for my overreaction.
Back on point, I understand the people have spoken on this being a
warning, but I can see this causing a rift among the development
community when this warning suddenly gets thrown up on all their
projects. I can see the benefit though, especially with the smaller
enumerations. It just personally seemed that a warning was too harsh,
and as Ryan Joseph pointed out, where is the line drawn? When is it
acceptable to omit something? For something like not initialising all
of the fields in an object constructor, I will happily have a warning
thrown at me because it counts as an uninitialised value, so long as
it's not a false positive (since some fields may get set in a different
method that's called by the constructor). However, should not including
an *else *branch in an *if* statement throw a warning - one can rightly
argue that that's stupid, but isn't the principle the same as the *case
*block?
I'm all for Pascal's design in forcing better programming standards,
even little things like the assignment and equality operators are
designed in such a way to prevent mistakes or subtle backdoors like that
infamous one that someone tried to slip into the Linux kernel back in
2003
(https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of-2003/).
Also a reason why I am vehemently against adding inline *var*
declarations like what was done in the most recent rendition of Delphi,
besides it violating the block design of Pascal.
Regarding the C-style assignment operators, some of the packages that
come with the compiler use them, and trying to build everything without
the -Sc flag will result in errors. Outside of that, the biggest one
that stands out is LazUTF8.pas for Lazarus - for example: Result += (nx
* ONEMASK) >> ((sizeof(PtrInt) - 1) * 8); - that should probably be
changed to something a little more Pascal-like, if Inc(Result, (nx *
ONEMASK) *shr* ((sizeof(PtrInt) - 1) * 8)); is acceptable.
Gareth aka. Kit
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