There are programmers who have trouble naming things. Actually it’s kind of normal among people in general, there’s even a quote that the two hardest things in computing is to invalidate cache and name things.
I can’t tell you why they did it, but for me it’s just a way of trying to name a lot of things and make the function more discoverable by having a few overloads.
In fact what it does is it works with various types that have decimal, floating point, or not, which is pretty funny :)
Documentation of Free Pascal.
Another curious thing is that the function that creates a kind of floating point is unique, which shows that whoever did it was not thinking very well about the problem. Documentation.
Exactly, any type of floating point will be converted.
– Roberto de Campos