What language enhancements do you think Delphi(Native version) needs?

Question

I've been a long-time Delphi developer and honestly day by day it started to feel more and more cumbersome especially in this age of dynamic languages like Python or Ruby. And not only the dynamic ones are progressing fast, C# and Java too are progressing at a fast rate due to competition (which were more or less comparable to Delphi's language features 5 years ago but Delphi really fell short in the coming years).

New features in 2009 version look promising and we surely need more. So, as a fellow Delphi user, what kind of language features do you think Delphi should have in order to compete with the other languages at least at the syntax level (that is to exclude high level issues like cross platform, garbage collection, etc..).

Edit: changing the subject to NATIVE version.

Answer 1

Also see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/268537/what-features-of-the-upcoming-delphi-prism-would-you-like-to-see-in-delphi-for

Answer 2

Native regular expressions. I currently use TPerlRegex from the guy who makes RegexBuddy (which is an AWESOME product). I'd really like to see this from the CodeGear team as part of the standard libraries.

I'd also be interested in seeing some Active Directory and OpenLDAP components from CodeGear.

Answer 3

Better SOAP handling is a bare requirement in order to survive, let alone advance.

Answer 4

One thing that I really would like to see, is native hash-handling like php and ruby. Both the native array and the desired hash should be assignment-compatible with a TList and TDictionary descendant, or even better - any class implementing a given interface.

var
  map: TDictionary;
  l: TList;
begin
  map := [1 = a, 2 = b, 3 = c];
  l := [1, 2, 3];
end

Answer 5

I would really like a qualified 'with' statement, because as it is now, people abuse 'with' way too much (it is actually considered a bad code 'smell' nowadays). The great thing about this is, that it can be used as a poor-mans version of local-variable at the same time (!)

Here a mock-up to show you what I mean by this :

procedure Example;
begin
  with s: TStringList.Create do
  try
    s.Add('Hello world');
    ShowMessage(s.Text);
  finally
    FreeAndNil(s);
  end;
end;

Answer 6

I'd like if the compiler would fill in missing parameters when using COM interfaces, so instead of writing

  ExcelApp.Run('foo', EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam,
    EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam,
    EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam,
    EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam,
    EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam,
    EmptyParam, EmptyParam, EmptyParam);

I could simply write

  ExcelApp.Run('foo');

and be done with it. It would also be great if named parameters would be supported, so I could only pass the first and for example fifth parameter and omit the others.

The same could be implemented for standard function calls, but this is not so important as there should not be that many parameters to begin with.

Answer 7

• Lamda Expressions / Closures
• Yield

(in native delphi, don't really care about Prism)