Dynamic record allocation

While it is very simple to dynamically create new objects—you just call the Create constructor—dynamic allocation of records and other data types (arrays, strings ...) is a bit more complicated.

In the previous section, we saw that the preferred way of allocating such variables is with the New method. The InitializeFinalize demo shows how this is done in practice.

The code will dynamically allocate a variable of type TRecord. To do that, we need a pointer variable, pointing to TRecord. The cleanest way to do that is to declare a new PRecord = ^TRecord type, like so:

type
  TRecord = record
    s1, s2, s3, s4: string;
  end;
  PRecord = ^TRecord;

Now, we can just declare a variable of type PRecord and call New on that variable. After that, we can use the rec variable as if it were a normal record and not a pointer. Technically, we would have to always write rec^.s1, rec^.s4, and so...