2013/9/24 Reinier Olislagers <reinierolislag...@gmail.com> > On 24/09/2013 09:09, Marco van de Voort wrote: > > In our previous episode, Bart said: > >>> Raise an exception > >> > >> This will break existing implementations that either expect IM to be > >> 999, or ABC to be 0 (indicating failure), and that certainly do not > >> expect that this function throws an exception at them. > > > > Yes, but since the routine probably has low utilisation I choose for > > structuring all conversion routines all the same. > I would rather choose for maintaining backward compatiblity, the *de > facto behaviour* (return 0 on invalid values) as it is quite sensible > for this kind of numbers. > > > Moreover I don't think that first attempts should fixate interfaces > > and behaviour forever. > It's quite strange though that Delphi compatibility is quite insistently > adhered to (BTW a good decision IMO). > The function has been in FPC stable (for presumably a while?) so I would > really think hard before changing it. >
I could not find any trace of it on the embarcadero web site. Wouldn't we be taking into account a compatibility with something which does not exist, by any chance? > And let's not beat about the bush: the main reason for the routine is to > > show beginning programmers that their homework can be done using a fixed > > function :-) > Nice going to show beginning programmers how to break backward > compatibility then ;) > Well, the alternative would be showing how to maintain buggy implementations because you don't want to break backward compatibility :-) Or it could show that sometimes rules have to be infringed. Or it could show the merits of exploring thoroughly the limits of a problem before committing code which could later place you in such a conflicting situation (I am not throwing stones to the developer who committed this function first, I have too often done the same mistake myself) -- Frederic Da Vitoria (davitof) Membre de l'April - « promouvoir et défendre le logiciel libre » - http://www.april.org
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