Hi all,

First of all best wishes for 2013.
And 2014 because I renewed the license for kolmck,net for another two years.. ;)

This new year I have a couple of questions to the community and our "benevolent ruler":

1. can't we skip Delphi 1,2,3,4 since Freepascal 2.6.X is better and *free* and compiles 99.99% of all sources upto Delphi 2007 now?
2. can we drop Freepascal 1.00-2.02 support?

My reason for these questions are:
1. Nobody uses D2 or D3 or if they DO they never tried FPC 2.6.X (let alone) or higher
2. Except for system.pas and sysutils.pas freepascal compiles everything you throw at it and the little fixes are minor.
3. This would - IMHO - greatly simplify kol.pas in readability.(I knowfor sure only Vladimir knows all about it and even I have problems reading the sources (not least because I finally need glasses at almost 55).
4. kolmck.net - and this topic on this forum dropped from 10.000+ a month to just under 1000 hits: that's imho not because of quality or delphi's demise, but because understanding kol becomes too complicated.
5. We can use other peoples more standard ways to adjust for unicode.

A stripped down version of kol is only half the size to read... And compiles just as well.

My suggestion is:

Freeze the current kol version for legacy sytems (< win2000) and clean kol.pas up for the future based on only TWO defines: $PUREPASCAL and $UNICODE. These are the industry standards. And it works with both Delphi > 4 and recent Freepascal....

It might help to attract new interest in kol.
(Instead of the interest from parser builders to see if they are compliant ;) )

Again,

Let's make it small,

Happy New Year!!

Regards,

Thaddy

My problem is what i need to write code for 32 and 64 bit, so, needs to avoid to use KOL often :( and most visible problems i got when tried to compile KOL by FPC 64 bit. But i agree, maybe time to remove some old code/conditions and simplify KOL sources?

That is my problem too: kol64 is much easier when I can drop all the legacy defines.

I fully agree, moving to FPC, dropping the old Delphi support and cleaning out the code would breathe new life into this project.

Although I rarely develop on Windows nowadays (mainly Linux now), I always turn to KOL for my Windows development.

I would dearly love to see a stable, updated and bullet-proof version of version of KOL for both 32bit and 64bit systems.

Yes, unicode support did hold us up a bit - but point 5 is right: use other's standard ways for unicode.

(And if anyone is feeling up to it, maybe continue the support for Linux that Vladimir once started...)

Indeed - let's "make it small" and keep it powerful!