Borland. Delphi 7: Component Writer’s Guide

Author and Publishers: Borland Software Corporation, 2002. - 187 p.Embarcadero Delphi, formerly CodeGear Delphi, Inprise Delphi and Borland Delphi, is an integrated development environment for Microsoft Windows applications originally developed by Borland and now owned and developed by Embarcadero Technologies. It utilizes a dialect of the Object Pascal programming language known as Delphi. Delphi XE is the most recent version and is distributed in four different editions: Starter, Professional, Enterprise and Architect.Delphi is a strongly typed high-level programming language, intended to be easy to use and originally based on the earlier Object Pascal language. Delphi, in contrast to traditional Pascal, was not primarily designed for education purposes. In addition to high-level language features Delphi also supports low level programming by allowing assembler parts and the notation of direct CPU opcodes is also possible. The language's object orientation features only class- and interface-based polymorphism. Metaclasses are first class objects. Objects are actually references to the objects (as in Java) which Delphi implicitly dereferences, so there's usually no need to manually allocate memory for pointers to objects or similar techniques needed in some other languages. There are dedicated reference counted string types (as well as null-terminated strings).Strings can be concatenated by using the '+' operator, rather than using functions. For those dedicated string types, no manual memory management is necessary as the memory manager handles this. The improved memory manager introduced with Borland Developer Studio 2006 now provides functions to track down memory leaks.