Bill Meyer

What sort of standards? That word is almost as useless on Google. 😉 But I can imagine all sorts of things I would seek to make standard within an application....

Quite a few years ago, someone wrote a series of articles on how to design forms that were testable in code. I thought it was also a great demo of why you should avoid doing so, as the added complexity was impressive. At any event, I thought I knoew who the author was, and in what magazine they were published, but I seem to have been wrong. A great deal of time on google didn't help. If anyone here recalls the articles, the magazine, or the author. please let me know. Bill

These were recommended to me: http://www.freeclipboardviewer.com/ https://nirsoft.net/utils/inside_clipboard.html MS Word, copying to the clipboard, inserts all manner of stuff. The export from GExperts was 3K; from MS Word, 44K. And I have no idea which particular chunk of content may make the difference. 😞 For now, I can export as RTF, paste into an editor and save, then import that to Affinity Publisher.I just discovered that ClipMate, which I have used for years, offers an Application Profile report which suggests in its section on Publisher that the current possibilities are only TEXT and RTF. However, the RTF fragment from GExperts pastes as plain text. If I save it in Notepad, and then Edit, Place (Import) in Publisher, it comes in with formatting, as it should. I am collecting datapoints, but I can't claim to have gained any useful insight.

I routinely use Source Export to capture snippets I then insert into MS Word as formatted text. Right now, I am attempting to do the same with Affinity Publisher as the target, but the text after paste is plain, not formatted. If I paste to MS Word, then copy the same block from MS Word and paste to Affinity Publisher, I get the desired result. But obviously, at the expense of more steps in the workflow. Is there some tool I can use to look at the raw content from the clipboard item, so I can get some idea how the Source Export differs from what I copy from MS Word?

That aspect you should be able to resolve easily enough with a TStringList as a buffer, and just iterate through the source stringlist from bottom to top, copying lines to the destination.

For reasons I have never understood, the TDataset and its descendants stream data, but not properties. In my own work, I have had to deal with this in connection with the field properties we wish to pass to reporting code. It is all very nice to have Alignment, DisplayFormat, and DisplayLabel, but rather annoying that there is no option to include them in streaming.

Not yet.....

A point not yet mentioned is the use of nested methods in the course of refactoring. In legacy code, it is not uncommon to find huge routines which have been thoughtlessly coded, and often with useless naming. I have found it helpful to remove to nested methods the chunks of code which might better be placed in a private class, as Arnaud suggests. Making them methods of the class in which you are working often makes no sense because these routines may have no practical value out of the context in which they were found. In new design, their use is harder to justify, I think.

Not obvious, to be sure. I am still cursing the new approach, which seems a good deal more complicated than necessary.

This subject came up yesterday at the office. I could not recall what topic it was in Knuth's magnum opus where he explains that although goto can always be avoided, there are rare cases in which its use brings performance benefits. Seems like a sorting discussion. Quicksort?

Oh, yes. you can pass 1..n units. Of course, what you may get, with name collisions -- which will not be reported -- is up for grabs. (Note that FixInsight now checks for with clauses which use more than one unit.)

The inherent dangers of 'with' are at their worst with such usage as: with UnitA, UnitB do.

And that's fine, but doesn't negate it being a bad fit for Delphi, does it?

Nor should we be surprised, as MVVM was evolved into by people working every day in C# and with XAML. This happened, I am told, as people simply found a comfortable approach in that environment, not because they sought to copy an idiom from another language.

Interesting. Had not heard of Rosinsky before.