Oh god, I get a Proustian flashbacks to my first programming steps just by looking at that Pascal assignment operator.
Delphi was wonderful. I remember showing it to an early colleague of mine who has only done C++ and he insisted that it had to be an interpreted language - because compile times were (what he thought to be) simply impossibly short.
"I don’t mind requiring two lines of code to accomplish what could be accomplished in one line if I can understand both lines." -- is very true. Even though I don't agree with some of the other things he says. I am not a fan of properties and I like the . vs -> difference which immediately tells you whether something is a pointer. And the notion that you can have the language with pointers and hide if rom the user, I find that questionable.
perhaps it's less of an issue in delphi (and pascal) since parameters that change in procedures have the var keyword?
In practice it doesn't seem to cause issues since pretty well every thing is a pointer, the only time it causes a problem is if you're using records. The compiler does catch this but, yes, in this case it is sub optimal. It's a trade off I suppose - 95-99.9% of the time your using classes so the '.' is everywhere rather than ->.
Interesting - I've always thought Delphi was easier to use than many other systems, but could never put my finger on why. It seems they thought about it a lot at the beginning in a hundred little ways.
Delphi was wonderful. I remember showing it to an early colleague of mine who has only done C++ and he insisted that it had to be an interpreted language - because compile times were (what he thought to be) simply impossibly short.