And, a more practical objection to {$IF ..} -- it does no good unless
the Borland IB team also supports it. And if they are going to do
that, they they might as well support the differing syntax.

Dave

> >
> >I was thinking now that IB and FB have shown signs of
> different paths, it
> might be useful to have
> >some kind of
> >
> >{$IFDEF __FIREBIRD}
> > SELECT FIRST 10 SKIP 5 * FROM MYTABLE
> >{$ELSE}
> > SELECT * FROM MYTABLE
> > ROWS 6 to 10
> >{$ENDIF}
> >
>
> <rant level=wolf authorization=helen>
>
> I know of no way to render a code base unmaintainable more
> quickly or more effectively that to introduce conditional
> compilation.
>
> Much of the reason that I was able to write the Interbase engine,
> remote interfaces (tcp, decnet, apollo ring), gpre (C and two
> pascal variants), gbak, gdef, qli, and dsql in about a year
> while 40 open source developers have struggled for nearly a
> year and a half to make the most modest of extensions is that
> I had clean, simple code, and you guys have an absolute warren
> of horrible, intertwined, utterly incomprehensible, infinitely
> conditional crap. When I left the code base not 5% of the modules
> contained any conditional code whatsoever. Now, I can't
> even follow the code I wrote without considering the effects
> of a half dozen dead code branches.
>
> Conditional code is either admission of incompetence, an
> unavoidable recognition of incompetence in a base system,
> or (legitimately) a highly locallized effort to cope with
> different environments, such as the difference between Win32
> and the Unix APIs.
>
> Perhaps the most courageous stand taken by the original Java
> developers was an absolute refusual to pollute their language
> with conditional compilation.
>
> Firebird has forked. If Borland Interbase won't participate in an
> architectural process to manage interoperability, write them
> off and get on with life.
>
> Please, please don't propogate pollution.
>
> </rant>
>
> Jim Starkey
>
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