Delphi 7/8 Language enhancements

From: Mark (mailme_at_marrr.co.uk)
Date: 11/28/03 

Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2003 20:17:16 -0000

Hello everyone

I received in my hand today, the latest copy of The Delphi Magazine, which had a
"review" of a beta of Delphi 8. Overall, the review was positive, but it did
imply that Delphi 8 may have come too late for some... many who wanted to dabble
with .net have already done so with C#, and will probably stick with it.
Nevertheless, Delphi 8 for .net is a significant development.

The review speculated that Win32 in its current form will be around for at least
10 years - (indeed, most apps that were written using Win16 still work on
Windows XP, and many of my early DOS utilities from "public domain" CD's (circa
1992/1993 still work in XP... I can even get DOOM to run!) There is no incentive
for Microsoft to remove or change the current api and break many thousands of
applications. This would destroy Windows, if anything. Backwards compatibility
has always been a strong point of Windows, imo.

Anyway, I digress... I was excited by some of the enhancements to the Object
Pascal language, which have in my opinion been long overdue, such as Operator
Overloading and Sealed Classes.

Can those in the know list any other enhancements to the language, and can we do
this yet:

procedure ThisIsLongOverDue;
var
  S : string = 'This is long overdue!';
begin
  ShowMessage(S);
end;

And also, will these D8 language changes be coming to Delphi 7? Given that there
is still years of life in Win32 development, i'd hate to see the evolution of
the Win32 version of Delphi end with Delphi 7.

Thanks in advance for any feedback

Mark

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