Sorry i meant anything when it came to Pascal, not in general. Many of the features found in Delphi 1 can also be found in other languages like Smalltalk (in fa

Sorry i meant anything when it came to Pascal, not in general. Many of the features found in Delphi 1 can also be found in other languages like Smalltalk (in fact sometimes i wonder if the reason of the massive changes between BP7 and Delphi 1 is Anders learning Smalltalk in-between :-P). About objects, i agree that the two systems are weird and IMO it is made even worse with the introduction of 'advanced records' in Free Pascal and recent Delphis which also act as objects-except-not-really. IMO the 'object' types should have been extended with the new stuff and have 'class' just be syntax sugar for 'pointer to object' and 'record' be just a synonym for 'object' for backwards compatibility (so that everything is really an 'object' - it is "Object Pascal" after all :-P). I do not know how Delphi handles this nowadays but in Free Pascal 'class' has the most advanced features but must always be heap allocated (meaning you can't embed them in other compound types or allocate them on the stack), 'object' has a lot of the 'class' and/or 'record' functionality but arbitrarily missing some (e.g. support for management operators, so you can't have RAII-like objects) and 'record' (after explicitly enabling support for advanced records) does have more functionality available (e.g. management operators) but does not support inheritance. You can work around it (e.g. put all your data of an object inside an advanced record with management operators and then put that record inside the object so that you can write code that does any cleanup when the object is declared on the stack and goes out of scope) but it can be annoying - and maddening when you work on the compiler itself and notice that all these compound data structures are implemented internally the same way and the compiler explicitly disables support for some!