Comments on: The Anti-Case campaign

By: Weps

Weps — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:43:47 +0000

Well, if you want to convince people to vote for it I suggest you change both examples.

Both are perfect examples why people should NOT use a “case” statement in an OOP language.

By: Anders Isaksson

Anders Isaksson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:37:39 +0000

I agree that it’s time to expand the capabilities of ‘case’. Go for it!

The ‘case with strings’ has been discussed many times on the Borland newsgroups. I have used a sorted TStringList with good effect, although you really need an enumeration for the case labels too, to be able to read the program.

http://www.google.com/url?url=http://groups.google.se/g/c307fefb/t/d186682bbe6cbe71/d/58d39ea2df36b2f8%3Fhl%3Dsv%26ie%3DUTF-8%26q%3Ddelphi%2Bcase%2Bstrings%2Bauthor:isaksson%2358d39ea2df36b2f8&ei=4Cf4Sr_QGoiqQJuN_Es&sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&source=groups&usg=AFQjCNEFH_2smm4So-5ftjXWFusQxRylHQ

http://tinyurl.com/yz7qz95

By: Ken Knopfli

Ken Knopfli — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:11:53 +0000

Ah, yes. Mary Travers. May she rest in peace.

By: Paul Ishenin

Paul Ishenin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:52:28 +0000

You can use string case in FreePascal now.

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:30:19 +0000

Since string supports the ‘=’ operator, your apostles are in.

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:29:39 +0000

Making us programmers insane!

Hmmm…. so in this way one can explain what’s happening in the .public.non-technical…

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:28:05 +0000

Hmmm…. are you sure??? ::g::

I think that’s the other way around: Delphi is (almost) the single language which doesn’t have case with strings!
And, yes, (gasp)!

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:26:49 +0000

Sure. Together with the poll’s results, I’ll put also the link.

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:26:20 +0000

“Strings would be slow;”
Not exactly. Will be faster compared with what we have now. (they can have sorted lists, hashes etc. – all generated at compile time) to optimize the search speed at RTM.

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:24:31 +0000

Yeah, knew it. Anyway, thanks for the link. It is one of the best workarounds given the actual situation. But it lacks of flexibility and readability compared with an official solution of course especially if the case list contains enough code to spawn more than one screen (yes, it happens sometimes). FTR, is what we use in our programs. Also, your approach can be extended using generics. Basically you can have a generic function IndexOf which will scans the array of the given type and returns the index of the sought element.

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:19:39 +0000

“There was a workaround for this but it allowed only case on strings.”
In fact there were two or tree. But all of these had drawbacks (naturally). The closest to perfection was (perhaps) Andreas Hausladen’s one which required a preprocessor.

“Just let them do this damn 64 bit compiler and cros paltform thing…;)”

…hehehe…

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:16:40 +0000

…but yes, the #1 is to have clean code. After this, if they can optimize it, so far so good.

By: Wings of Wind

Wings of Wind — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:15:52 +0000

Yes, depending on how the case will look like there can be applied different optimizations: hashes, sorted lookup lists or the bare-bone fast implementation as is today.

By: Pete Goodwin

Pete Goodwin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:40:17 +0000

c# has case with (gasp) strings!

By: John G

John G — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:00:02 +0000

@ Is this so hard to enhance ?

I think it is against it’s intended purpose:

Making us programmers insane!

By: Louis Kessler

Louis Kessler — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:44:05 +0000

I agree. Case should work for everything.

Then technically, as others have commented, it can replace IF-THEN-ELSE IF-…

By: Xepol

Xepol — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:15:18 +0000

Makes sense, register a QC item.

By: Marshall Fryman

Marshall Fryman — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:57:32 +0000

Zarko and I both talked about case with string and some of the performance issues involved. You can read Zarko's implementation here and several variations and performance numbers here

By: Mason Wheeler

Mason Wheeler — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:10:49 +0000

What about Mary?

By: Dimitrij

Dimitrij — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:51:31 +0000

There was a workaround for this but it allowed only case on strings. Don’t remember now where I saw it, wasn’t it on the Andreas Hausladen page?
Anyway, in my oppinion it is another thing that everyone wants but how much people actually will be using it?

Do you really need a case on a class or on an instance of object?

For me it is quite sufficient to make 3 if’s depending on an object type. I’ve never needed any more in my practice.

Just let them do this damn 64 bit compiler and cros paltform thing…;)