Records
Submitted by taoyue on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 21:04
A record allows you to keep related data items in one structure. If you want information about a person, you may want to know name, age, city, state, and zip.
To declare a record, you'd use:
TYPE
TypeName = record
identifierlist1 : datatype1;
...
identifierlistn : datatypen;
end;
TypeName = record
identifierlist1 : datatype1;
...
identifierlistn : datatypen;
end;
For example:
type
InfoType = record
Name : string;
Age : integer;
City, State : String;
Zip : integer;
end;
InfoType = record
Name : string;
Age : integer;
City, State : String;
Zip : integer;
end;
Each of the identifiers Name, Age, City, State, and Zip are referred to as fields. You access a field within a variable by:
VariableIdentifier.FieldIdentifier
A period separates the variable and the field name.
There's a very useful statement for dealing with records. If you are going to be using one record variable for a long time and don't feel like typing the variable name over and over, you can strip off the variable name and use only field identifiers. You do this by:
WITH RecordVariable DO
BEGIN
...
END;
BEGIN
...
END;
Example:
with Info do
begin
Age := 18;
ZIP := 90210;
end;
begin
Age := 18;
ZIP := 90210;
end;