[Lazarus] FPDoc Editor fails on namespace dotted unit names?

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Mattias Gaertner schrieb:
> On Sun, 14 Apr 2013 03:52:46 -0400
> Anthony Walter <sysrpl at 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