David Heffernan

Why don't you want to use a third party component?

That's what RPyC would gain you

Two different values can have the same checksum. Read my previous post again. What you are expecting is impossible. I mean it. Impossible.

What is a signature? All these terms being bandied about!!

Yeah, that's not a hash. And what you want (known max length) is clearly impossible. If you could store arbitrary data in a lossless way in a data of a fixed length, then well, you can see where I am going.

OK, maybe I misunderstood. I saw "hashing" and "indexed on", and inferred that you want to use a hashed collection like a dictionary. Hence the need to define data structure and what equality means. But perhaps you want to hash this data for some other reason. What will you do with this hash?

First of all, don't worry about hashing the data. Work out how to represent the data, what data structure to use. And then define what you mean by equality for this data. Once you have done that, and have a clear specification of that, defining a hash function should be obvious. But if not, we will be able to help at that point. But first you need to define the data structure and the equality operator.

Any code can terminate the process. The way you avoid this is to ensure that the code you run doesn't lead to fatal errors. In this case it sounds like the issue is that you need to make sure that your environment has the correct packages installed.

What is the advantage over Timsort?

I'm not sure what you want to do. Do you want to read the XML quickly? Or do you want to read the XML without using CPU resources? Because it seems like you want to do both but of course you can do one or the other but not both.

What algorithm?

No. This is of course easy to test using debugging techniques, trace logging etc. It's also documented in the language guide.

@Stefan Glienke already explained that quadword reads/writes are atomic for aligned data.

This is true for all atomic memory operations. Is your argument that we should not use atomic memory operations? That can't be what you mean. Like all code, there are pre-conditions for it to work. In this case we require the memory to be aligned. Onus for that falls on the user. And it's clear that Thomas knows this.

No. The polymorphism applies to method dispatch, and not to the types.

No. It's not counting lines. It's counting warnings. The compiler emits two distinct warnings. For whatever reason they are identical. There's doubtless some internal quirk that explains it.

They are all counted correctly. Look in the screen shots. Count the items marked error, warning and hint. Compare to the totals reported. In every single case these match. I think in this case you need to pay a bit more attention to the detail.

A function's return type is defined at compile time. So whilst you might return objects of different types in the implementation, the type that you declare as the return value type is determined when ylthe code is compiled, and must be an ancestor of all possible types that are actually returned. This is strong typing in action. Types determined at compile time. That's how delphi is. Dynamic typing seems like what you are wanting here. But that isn't something that exists in Delphi. That's something that you find typically in lamguages like Python.

They are counting correctly. When it says 2 errors, there are 2 errors. When it says 3 warnings, there are 3 warnings. What you have noted is that there are sometimes duplicate warnings. But they are counted correctly. Tell me this, how does a duplicate warning have any discernible impact to any user? Why would it be a useful way to spend development resource on such trivialities?

The fact that you regard this topic as important. That you feel it's important to count errors beyond one. The fact that sometimes delphi emits two warnings for the same issue. None of these things matter.

Sure. But if that's all you read then you don't see the big picture.

Perhaps this explains the focus on tiny details and missing the bigger picture. We all know about the importance of attention to detail. Of course the compiler spitting out two warnings rather than one here is imperfect. But it has no impact on any user. It's trivial. Delphi has so many big issues and this is what gets people heated?!

The complete lack of perspective here is breathtaking.

Leaving aside my sarcastic response above, I think a majority of Delphi users will not regard this as an issue. What happens here is that the compiler reaches a point where the errors which have been encountered so far mean that it decides to abort compilation of this unit. And it reports that decision as an error. It's been this way since the dawn of time. Nobody, but nobody, cares about precisely how many errors there are in their code. There are two states that matter: The code has no errors. The code has some errors. Were the compiler to do what you ask, and not write the "cannot compile unit" error, and report a single error, you would not know that there was but a single error. Because the compiler had given up and any errors that are present in the code which follows the point at which the compiler aborted, would not be counted. It is useful for the compiler to report counts of hints and warnings, since these values are meaningful. Counts of errors are, as I have shown above, are not. That this even has to be explained astounds me.

Modern C++ projection would be wondrous. Get rid of all those macros!