On Thursday, 13. December 2001 19:29, David Schnepper wrote:

> 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.

And from the impression that I get reading the interbase.general and
opensource newsgroups this won't happen. And reading John Arthurs (or what
was his name? I don't have the article at hand quite now.) comments in a
german developers magazine, we are living in different worlds.

>
> Dave
> > <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.

Oh, yes, this is one reason, for me there are two (three or even four) more,
1. It is always difficult to read this ugly^h^h^h^h code that somebody else
has produced.
2. (my fault) I'm a pascal programmer.
3. Usually there are only two or three of these 40 developers working at the
code at a given time.
4. (maybe related to 3.) We have to do less interesting things during the day
to earn some money :-)

> > Firebird has forked. If Borland Interbase won't participate in an
> > architectural process to manage interoperability, write them
> > off and get on with life.

I think we should accept this fact and just go our own way.
(as I'm doing 'in house' conversions at the moment I may be biased)

And to prevent flames : I have used Borland tools since 1984, was always
happy with them and have just recently discovered some minor glitches in
their view of the world outside of "made in Borland" :-)

never mind
Frank

--
"Fascinating creatures, phoenixes. They can carry immensely heavy loads,
their tears have healing powers and they make highly faithful pets."
- J.K. Rowling http://firebirdsql.org