On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 8:22 AM, Noah Silva <shir...@galapagossoftware.com> wrote: > > If you want to convince people to use FPC and are having issues, you should > ask them what features, exactly, they are looking for. Chances are that FPC > has them. (If they want a functional language, though, then you're out of > luck).
Pascal is not entirely opposed to being a functional language. There are two missing language features (consider it a proposal of Functional Pascal): (1) A declaration part, that parallels "var", with keyword "val" or "let" (since "val" is taken up by a procedure). It introduces named values, i.e. non-assignable variables. The part after "=" can be any expression. Therefore, this feature spoils the "declaration -- implementation divide" that is dear to Pascal. (2) Closures. That is, making local functions that only use "const" arguments and "val / let" variables safe to return from the outer function. This can be done by allocating the "val / let" data on the heap, or perhaps easier by copying them into an implicitly built object and interpreting the returned local function as pointer to method of this object. The closure-object would be memory-managed as other objects. What do you think? _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
