[ ] Delphi uses the -based programming language called introduced by Borland. It supports native. Its visual designer has traditionally used (VCL) for RAD. To better support development for Microsoft Windows and interoperate with code developed with other software development tools, Delphi supports independent interfaces of (COM) with class implementations, and support for many third-party components. Implementations can be delegated to fields or properties of classes. Message handlers are implemented by tagging a method of a class with the integer constant of the message to handle.
Connectivity is extensively supported through the many VCL database-aware and database access components. Later versions have included upgraded and enhanced runtime library routines provided by the community group, established in 2003. Characteristics [ ] Delphi is a, intended to be easy to use and originally based on the earlier Object Pascal language. Was originally developed as a general-purpose language 'suitable for expressing the fundamental constructs known at the time in a concise and logical way', and 'its implementation was to be efficient and competitive with existing FORTRAN compilers' but without low-level programming facilities or access to hardware. Turbo Pascal and its descendants, including Delphi, support access to hardware and low-level programming, with the facility to incorporate code written in and other languages.
Delphi's features only class- and interface-based. Metaclasses are first class objects. Objects are actually references to the objects (as in ), which Delphi implicitly de-references, so there is usually no need to manually allocate memory for pointers to objects or use similar techniques that some other languages need. There are dedicated reference-counted string types, and also null-terminated strings. Strings can be concatenated by using the '+' operator, rather than using functions.