Delphi Strings (was Re: Desirability of C++)

[Ray Blaak <blaak@infomatch.com>]

Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com> writes:
> > I think it was the ucsd-pascal people who first got it right.
> 
> They got some things right, and some things wrong.  For example, the
> limit of 255 characters is pretty annoying -- even in the bad old days
> of smaller memories.

For Delphi 4 and above, at least, strings by default are long strings, which
an have arbitrary length (up to 2GB). They are also automatically garbage
collected and shared using copy-on-write semantics.

The {$H+/-} switch controls whether or not the "String" type represents long
strings or short strings (i.e. max 255 chars).

I find that the need to use explicitly bounded strings in Delphi programs is
very very rare. Most of the time strings are just used to hold "a bunch of
text". For that purpose they work very well and are pretty efficient.

My only complaint is that one cannot derive distinct string types. Supposedly
in Delphi one can do things like:

  type Name = type String; // this should be a distinct type
  var
     n : Name;
     s : String;
  begin
     s := 'hi there';
     n := s; // I want a compile error here.
  end;

-- 
Cheers,                                        The Rhythm is around me,
                                               The Rhythm has control.
Ray Blaak                                      The Rhythm is inside me,
blaak@infomatch.com                            The Rhythm has my soul.