Mattias Gaertner schrieb:
On Sun, 14 Apr 2013 03:52:46 -0400
Anthony Walter <sys...@gmail.com> wrote:
Normally I don't reply to a technical discussion when a question about a
possible bug is posed back with (channels inner nerd) "Why would you ever
want to do that?"... followed up attempts to chastise. But I'll give you
some honest answers.
The dotted unit name concept is not a simple change. It heavily effects
the scope rules and resolving mechanism.
+1
The dotted names have been introduced in the .NET experiment, which has
been dropped later, but now they have to be for supported for
compatibility with newer Delphi versions. But like Delphi provides a
number of incompatible versions, FPC IMO should do the same and freeze
pre-2000 (D7 compatible), Ansi (D2007?), Unicode (D2009..XE) etc.
releases, and should *not* try to merge features from different Delphi
versions into only one compiler and RTL.
The same for Lazarus, which also should stop trying to support all
Delphi versions in one LCL and IDE. It's obvious that the LCL cannot
support Ansi/UTF-8 and Unicode at the same time, this has been discussed
already. Also the new XE3 GUI requires a very new component library, in
addition to the LCL. Other features, like the dotted unit names, can
have an heavy impact on the IDE/code tools (code completion, FPDoc and
its editor, Helpfile content...), and also should be supported in
different Lazarus versions. The only other solution IMO would require to
make many packages polymorphic, so that they can be activated depending
on the version of the current project.
There are many other todos, so you have to convince developers, that
this feature has no simple workaround and has priority.
But maybe you don't need the full dotted unit name concept. Then maybe
some half implementations are enough.
Beforementioned program versions must not be absolutely frozen, it may
be possible to add some non-breaking support (LazBuild, Generics...)
also to older FPC/Lazarus versions, as developer time, bounties etc.
permit. Nothing stops FPC/Lazarus versions from being *better* than the
compatible Delphi versions :-)
Just my 0.02€
DoDi
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