Jürgen Hestermann wrote on Wed, 22 Aug 2012:
Am 2012-08-22 13:45, schrieb Lukasz Sokol:
Recompilation when one of units/libraries was upgraded, almost
always implies
rebuild. Who on Earth is so trigger-happy to upgrade, rebuild and
not test for
regressions? This is the only sane way to get the process going -
document it
*as MML said below*;
That's not the point. Why on earth should a programmer *not* get as
much help as possible
from a programming language/compiler? That's the genuine purpose of
a programming language.
Indeed.
Though I don't know whether it can be implemented easily (if at all).
There are definitely some practical problems:
* class/record helpers. The last class/record helper for a particular
type that has come into scope automatically adds its methods to the
helped class/record. If symbols can only be accessed by explicitly
qualifying them with a separately specified unit alias, I don't see
how you would "activate" class helpers from aliased units. Would these
be an exception to the rule? Or would this require a new language
construct to import all desired helper types explicitly?
* Objective-Pascal categories are the same as class helpers, except
that there an unlimited number of categories can be active for a
single class at the same time. In the end, it's the same problem as
above though.
* Objective-Pascal also has the special "id" type. It is possible to
call any method of any class type (and associated categories) in scope
on a variable of this type. Again, I don't see a way how the proposed
mechanism could be used to tell the compiler which classes it should
search and which not if it should only search fully qualified
identifiers from aliased units.
There may be more issues, but these are the ones I can immediately think of.
Jonas
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