[lazarus] Two FPC questions

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Michal Bukovjan wrote:

> Michael.VanCanneyt at Wisa.be wrote:
>
> >On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, [ISO-8859-1] Sebastian G?nther wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >>> Michael.VanCanneyt at wisa.be schrieb:
> >>
> >>
> >>>> >
> >>>> > FormatC can easily be implemented and added to SysUtils. If you implement
> >>>> > it, I can add it.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> ehm... but in C, things like \t are just converted to their ASCII
> >>> representation by the compiler and get stored as such in the binary. I
> >>> would suggest to just add a helper function which converts strings with
> >>> C-like escaped characters to a normal string, instead of writing
> >>> high-level functions such as FormatC. (something like EscapeC/UnescapeC;
> >>> the same could be done for other escaping schemes as well)
> >>
> >>
> >
> >I don't think this is a compiler matter, but a preprocessor matter.
> >In such case it would be better to add general preprocessor support
> >to lazarus or the compiler, and write some standard m4 preprocessing
> >statements for this job.
> >
> >If we honor requests like this, the sky is the limit and finally code
> >becomes totally unreadable as it is in C. Macroitis is a C disease,
> >and should remain a C disease. So, I don't think this is a good idea.
> >
> >Michael.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> To have a platform and language independent tab, newline etc,
> representation is in fact a very good idea.
> It is supported by other languagea as well, like Python or Perl - only
> Pascal stands out.
> Without it (or something similar), it will be virtually impossible to
> maintain mutliline translations via standard gettext tools.

Nothing a run-time function cannot solve, I would think ?
I just don't think that it should be a _language_ feature.

Michael.