Function Result Name (Obscure Syntax #5) - Delphi #154

Alister Christie is a Delphi MVP (Most Valued Professional), Consultant, Developer, Trainer, Presenter, and Author. He has presented at ADUG (Australasian Delphi Users Group) Symposia and Code Rage Conferences for many years. Alister holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Victoria University, Wellington. He lives near Wellington, New Zealand.

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[CapeCodGunny]

Yes, I knew about this. It took me a while adopt the "Result" way.

[AndreasToth]

Yes, both seen and used this syntax in old code. I wish there was a compiler flag to disable it, though. It really shouldn't be used.

[RohitGupta-jntt]

That was the only way to do it in Turbo Pascal. I still keep coming across it in my libraries and I upgrade it when I do. :-)

[nicktucker]

That's the way I used to do it back in th TP 5.5 days, probably through to Delphi 3'ish

[yegorstyblyna]

where is Exit('Some string');?

[MrPontiac]

I actually forgot this was a thing. I was aware of it but I've always used Result, not the function name. It's more clear that the Result of the function is to be set instead of the name of the function. (So maybe in my TP3 or TP5 days, I did that once or twice as a novelty, but I quickly dropped it just for the aesthetic)

[eitan]

isn't that a recursive call if Foo is calling itself...?
i mean, sure it's a very simple function, but in a more complex function a recursive can be very tricky

[ChristianCristofori]

Well there’s a case where this was actually useful. In a quite old very large function returning a Boolean value, there were a lot of sub-functions each returning a Boolean themselves. I’m not going to explain the whole logic of that function, but in a couple of sub-functions if an Exception was thrown the main function return value should be inverted, there the Result would map to sub-function return value, instead the “Foo” was the main return value. That’s the only case I found this useful. By the way I personally didn’t like how the code was written but it was so old and intricate into the 30 years old software (started in Pascal) I couldn’t rewrite that thing and had to accept it as is. So you always need to be sure you’re not going to change some logic by doing a Search&Replace.

[landaucorl]

Not obscure at all :-), that's how I started programming, in the nineties