Marco Cantù
Essential Pascal
2nd Edition, March 2003
(version 2.01)
APOLLO, THE GOD WORSHIPED AT DELPHI,
IN AN ITALIAN 17TH CENTURY FRESCO.
Essential Pascal [Copyright 1995-2003 Marco Cantù] www.marcocantu.com/epascal 1
Introduction
he first few editions of Mastering Delphi, the best selling Delphi book I've written,
provided an introduction to the Pascal language in Delphi. Due to space constraints and
because many Delphi programmers look for more advanced information, in the latest
edition this material was completely omitted. To overcome the absence of this information, I've started
putting together this ebook, titled Essential Pascal.
T
This is a detailed book on Pascal, which for the moment will be available for free on my web site
(I really don't know what will happen next, I might even find a publisher). This is a work in progress, and
any feedback is welcome. The first complete version of this book, dated July '99, has been published on
the Delphi 5 Companion CD.
Note to the Second Edition
After a few years (in the early 2003), the book had a complete revision, trying to refocus it even
more on the core features of the Pascal language. Alongside, the book covers the language from the
perspective of the Delphi for Windows programmer, but also of the Kylix and Delphi for .NET
programmer. Differences among these different versions of the language will be mentioned.
This change in focus (not only Delphi with the VCL library) was another reason to change most
of the examples from visual ones to console based ones – something I plan doing but that I still haven't
done. Beside the theoretical advantage that the reader con focus even more on the language, ignoring
event handlers, methods, component, and other more advance topics, only using a console application
the code will be easily portable among the different compilers Borland has made available for Delphi in
the recent years.
Another change is that I’ve gone from an HTML-based format to a PDF based one. With the
increased bandwidth people generally h