dummzeuch

The current installer for Delphi 11 and 12 contains an ancient DLL which is full of bugs (mostly in highDPI environments), so I don't think it should be re-released just as a signed executable. I'll think about it.

Thanks for your kind offer. But how would that work in practice? The point of signing is trust, so if you sign the installer you are taking over the responsibility for this installer. If "anything bad" happens due to running this installer, you will be blamed for it because you signed it. Therefore you'd have to read the GExperts source code and also the installer script to make sure they don't contain anything malicious, and in addition you would have to keep track of any changes made to them. - Alternatively you would have to trust me and all past (many) and current (very few) contributors to GExperts. - Then you'd have to build the DLL and the installers - simple: Get the source code and run two batch files - and sign it.

I'm not going to buy a certificate just so I can sign my open source programs. But if anybody else wants to create a signed installer, go ahead. GExperts is open source after all. Just make sure you comply with the license.

Please create a bug report on SourceForge.

Machine Learning is a category of AI. LLM is a different category of AI.

Argl! I knew there would be side effects. There was a reason for the code I disabled after all...

Yes. But only if they are simple types or (for complex types like large records or arrays) if they are passed by reference (var/const). On the other hand: I doubt that this makes much of a difference for most programs.

You have listed chatGPT. Which version(s) were you using? My own experience is that neither the free chatGPT nor Gemini are any good for producing Delphi code. I haven't tried any others.

Exit, Break and Continue are all good. No problem with them being used properly. These local variables that are shared between local functions are very different because they tend to have larger scope that is harder to manage. Somehow I expected your opinion to be different from mine...

Unless, of course you need a local type declaration that you don't want to be visible outside the unit. Such a type can be declared inside a procedure / method and used within that method and any nested procedure. To convert these nested procedures into methods, you will have to move the type declaration outside the main procedure/method. The same applies to constants.

In my opinion using this kind of variables falls into the same class as using break and continue in a loop. A little bit better than goto, a little bit worse than using exit. I use it sparingly, but as I said: Sometimes it is just convenient.

I use them sometimes as a convenient way not to pass too many parameters. As far as I remember this comes with a performance penalty though. I declare those shared variables at the top of the main procedure, above the nested procedures, and those that are not shared below the nested procedures.

... and save the changed desktop.

There is no such option.

fixed in revision #4248

ahem: just saying ...

As mentioned in my previous post on dzDebugVisualizer I was thinking about writing a generalized debug visualizer which can be user-configured to register itself for any data type. Well, that debug visualizer now exists. It’s part of dzDebugVisualizer and called “Universal Visualizer for Delphi”. Read on in the blog post.

You can only call methods and functions that you could also use in the unit being debugged. So make sure you include the unit that exports these in the uses clause.

Another one is "social" media.

Given that most sites don't offer feeds any more or have hidden them so most people won't know they exist, I don't think this will make much of a difference.

(I am giving some background first, there are actually some questions at the end, so please bear with me.) In older Delphi IDEs there is a compiler option called "Reference Info" with a sub option "Definitions only". In newer IDEs it's called "Symbol reference Info" and can have three values "None", "Definitions Only" and "Reference Info". I never really thought about these options but just left them at the default which is both turned on for old Delphi versions and "Reference Info" for newer ones. Today I noticed that they were set differently in some of my projects and I wondered why that was and for the first time ever looked into the documentation on that topic: (These are just the last two paragraphs of the remarks.) "Code browsing" is the Ctrl+Click (or Alt+Up or Search -> Find original symbol, which oddly enough has an additional Hotkey Ctrl+G) feature combined with the Alt+Left / Alt + Right keys and the corresponding arrow buttons in the tool bar (respectively the two menu entries in View -> History). So that probably means that Ctrl+Click only works for units that were compiled with "Reference Info" is turned on. I could not verify this though: I switched a Delphi 10.2 project to "Symbol Reference Info = None", deleted all dcus, rebuilt it and Ctrl+Click still worked for all kinds of symbols: Inside the same unit, in other units of the projects and (less surprising, because these are the debug dcus that come with Delphi) in the RTL and VCL units. But what is "the References page of the Code Browsing feature"? Is that what you get when selecting "Find -> Find References" ? If yes, why is that menu item disabled most of the time, even though the default for newer Delphi versions is "Reference Info"? And what is the "Project Manager References Page"?

Are you aware of the overloaded functions that take an additional TFormatSettings parameter?

Having read through this entire thread, I can only repeat what others already said: Changing the interface part of SysUtils requires recompiling nearly all other RTL and VCL units. That was already the case with Delphi 7. I also agree that this is most likely not the best solution to your actual problem. You said you needed a global variable in the interface section of SysUtils that multiple functions in that unit access. Which functions are you talking about and what is the purpose of this change? If you don't tell us, we can't suggest alternative solutions.

I'll be on vacation. Maybe I will find some time to look into this.

I have never ever confused Pascal Strings with C char* types. (And I have done quite a lot C programming at the beginning of my career, parallel to using Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic, before I chose Delphi as my main programming tool.)