Many years ago I bought D2009 which has built in anonymous methods. But I have done nothing with them.
I think anonymous function has some limited syntactic sugar use (that shouldn't be overrated). But as Lelelumbo says, who is going to do it?
FPC has many useless Delphi features added because of compatibility, but the exact prioritization is mostly done by the implementers, not by a grand plan.
The
big problem is of course that new Delphi users are really motivated to try out all the new features of the horribly expensive suite they just bought, even if
it isn't really needed and the Pascal world has lived 40 years without. Most public Delphi codebases are simply of questionable quality from a portability viewpoint.
This is also where comparisons with
C++ totally
fail. A C++ programmer would never use a feature just new in one codebase for public consumption. Public codebases
are carefully crafted to a widely compatible consensus of the standard. Public Delphi codebases throw everything together (portable, newest "features") with a blatan disregard of cross compiler portability.
IOW the reason why this works with C++ is because those C++ codebases are crafted with cross-compiler use in mind.
I find them difficult to use and with my code I can do anything I want (for now).
Why should Lazarus be the same as Delphi?
To use codebases. But this is not black/white, and it will never be a blind "push the recompile button" style change.
When I joined in '97 and we were still pursuing TP compatibility (iow pre Delphi), it was exactly the same. People raved about the most obvious missing compatibility
item of the TP list, and argue that it was very important, and that you couldn't do without it etc etc. Half of them were not even sane (since 16-bitisms)
The problem is always that people consider Delphi clean. It isn't, most codebases are a versioned mess with hidden bugs, and horrible from a portability standpoint.
If it should be, Lazarus is only interesting for people who can't by Delphi (except the *unix users).
Haven't bought Delphi in the distant past. Buying delphi now or in the last few years is less logical, since Embacadero seems to really want to deemphasize VCL and Windows development in favour of FM and mobile. So why buy iut then?