String are probably the most used data type in Delphi. They also have a very interesting implementation, optimized for fast execution. To be exact, AnsiString (with all its variations) and UnicodeString (also known as string) are optimized. The WideString type is implemented in a different manner. As short strings (declarations like string[17]) are only used for backwards compatibility, I won't discuss them in this book.
Let's deal with the more widely used AnsiString and UnicodeString first. A data of such type is represented with a pointer to a block, allocated from the memory manager. If a string is empty, this pointer will be nil (which is at the CPU level represented with number zero) and if a string is not empty, it will point ...
