> System.exit was always a thing
Do you suggest I should use System.exit everywhere (even though all the code you find on the net uses just "exit")? Just to be sure that Delphi will never ever choose the wrong function to call WHICH IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE DONE IN THE FIRST PLACE OMG IT'S TOO FRIGGING COMPLICATED PLEASE DELPHI APPLY SOME COMMON SENSE.
It's beyond me why I should write a function call and incur symbol resolution for such basic control flow in the first place.
> the last time I used raw goto
I was mainly speaking about return, break, continue, which don't seem to be popular in Delphi. Examples of Delphi code that isn't a messy nesting fest? As for goto, there are perfectly valid uses for it, in fact some where goto is the clearest and most maintainable choice when you simply skip downwards over a chunk of code without requiring an extra flag.
> Regarding strings
I'm talking about the culture. The culture around C is not one that makes anti-modular "abstractions" (at least if you stay away from MS). You will never see me using wchar_t, GString or any of that god-awful Microsoft string mess. I get along just fine with only char. In fact, the string handling I get by using C is the most painless, most modular I've ever gotten in any language. (No, I don't want to use split() or use any other high-level stuff that would do allocations when that isn't necessary).
In Delphi, different story. Everything you find in this culture is built around String and AnsiString and UnicodeString and WideString and what not. Try googling how to access command-line parameters. The stuff is pervasive. Entirely different story.
> Nominal typing is much safer for large scale engineering than type aliases, which don't provide a mechanism to prevent incorrect usage of types.
Exactly, typealiases are bad. And now explain to me why Delphi forces me to make a type alias (for use in function signatures) when that is worse than immediate Pointer syntax in every conceivable aspect? (Having written a compiler I know the answer: because it requires less code in the compiler to check for type equality).
So I guess I should just avoid pointers altogether and use only GC'ed boxed OOP NOMINAL types. And finally have some time for coffee again while my application takes 5-10 minutes to start up (as it did before I reworked the thing), instead of 1 sec.
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