Delphi Language Manual Guide

This tutorial describes the Delphi language as it is used in Borland development tools. This book describes the Delphi language on both the Win32, and .NET development platforms. Specific differences in the language between the two platforms are marked as appropriate.

Table of contents

• Language Overview
• Programs and Units
• Using Namespaces with Delphi
• Data Types, Variables, and Constants
• Simple Types
• String Types
• Procedures and Functions
• Classes and Objects
• Fields
• Methods
• Libraries and Packages
• Writing Dynamically Loaded Libraries
• Memory Management on the Win32 Platform
• Internal Data Formats

Introduction to Delphi language

Delphi is a RAD (Rapid Application Development) development environment
based on Pascal language. It allows to quickly and easily realize Windows applications.
This speed and simplicity of development are due to a visual design of the application. Delphi offers a very complete set of ready-to-use visual components including almost all Windows components (buttons, dialogs, menus, toolbars ...) as well as experts to easily create various types
applications and libraries.

To master the development of an application under Delphi, it is essential to address the following three topics:

• Pascal language and object-oriented programming;
• Delphi Integrated Development Environment (IDE);
• Delphi objects and the class hierarchy of its library.

We will complete this approach by connecting to databases with Delphi.

The Delphi IDE

The Delphi interface
The figure below shows the typical interface of Delphi. She is made of :

• the menu bar (at the top),
• the icon bar (on the left under the menu bar),
• the component palette (on the right under the menu bar),
• the card designer (in the center),
• the code editor (in the middle under the form designer),
• the Object Inspector (on the left).