[DUG] [computing]XE2 string conversion question

[Alister Christie]

 From memory (which is not as good as it use to be), Delphi 1* 
introduced variable length strings, String[32] was a string of up to 32 
characters (I think it's actually size was 33 bytes - an extra byte to 
indicate length stored in position 0).  Prior to that strings were 
always 256 bytes (1 length byte and 255 character bytes) - which when 
you only have 64k of memory....

*It may have been a version of Turbo Pascal.

Alister Christie
Computers for People
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On 17/01/2012 9:48 p.m., Jolyon Smith wrote:
> @Stefan
>
> Of course there are reasons to use short strings, just as there are 
> reasons for using ANSIString, RawByteString and all the other string 
> types.  Horses for courses.
>
> In the case of short strings, the reasons are the same reasons there 
> always were - most especially for use in records used for structured 
> file access (file of <record type>).  And I am not so sure about the 
> idea that 255 bytes are always allocated - surely the whole point of a 
> declared short string type of a specified length is that it will hold 
> a string of that declared length, come what may.
>
> Otherwise using file of <record type> containing short string fields 
> would never have worked!
>
> +0.02
>
> Jolyon
>
>
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