Borland® Delphi™ 6 Developer's Guide

Object Pascal Types

One of Object Pascal's greatest features is that it's strongly typed, or typesafe. This means that actual variables passed to procedures and functions must be of the same type as the formal parameters identified in the procedure or function definition. You won't see any of the famous compiler warnings about suspicious pointer conversions that C programmers have grown to know and love. This is because the Object Pascal compiler won't permit you to call a function with one type of pointer when another type is specified in the function's formal parameters (although functions that take untyped Pointer types accept any type of pointer). Basically, Pascal's strongly typed nature enables it to perform a sanity check of your code—to ...