No, Jolyon is correct, I got it wrong - Shortstring was always 256bytes but shortstring with a length was always length+1 bytes in memory.
Nevertheless, having a max of 255 ascii characters is a bit limiting in todays world. I don't think many programmers still use shortstrings - at least I haven't used it in any of my many projects since the old days of Turbo Pascal. Kind Regards, Stefan Mueller _______________________ R&D Manager ORCL Toolbox LLP, Japan <http://www.orcl-toolbox.com/> http://www.orcl-toolbox.com From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alister Christie Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 6:08 AM To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List Subject: Re: [DUG] [computing]XE2 string conversion question >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 Ph: 04 471 1849 Fax: 04 471 1266 http://www.salespartner.co.nz Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/salespartner PO Box 13085 Johnsonville Wellington 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 _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: [email protected] Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to [email protected] with Subject: unsubscribe
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