I was assigned with a new programming task and I found the following constant declaration in the base code (Delphi 2007):
const
s1 : PChar = ^@;
I was not sure about the meaning of such statement: the first ideas in my mind pointed me to think about some kind of pointer related syntax. I was induced to think so for the caret (^) and the at (@) symbols (operators?), which allow dereferencing a pointer and returning the address of a variable respectively.
Despite my hunch, the meaning of the above constant declaration was very different from my initial thoughts. Actually, it’s quite trivial…it just declares a constant, named s1, as type PChar and with the null character as constant value. Such declaration might be substituted with the following alternatives:
const
s1 : PChar = '';
const
s1 : PChar = #0;
The original construction is known as Caret notation. “In caret notation, the null character is ^@. Since ^A is character 1, then 0 must use the character before 'A' which is '@' in ASCII.”
The Caret notation for the Null character works well in both Ansi and Unicode versions of Delphi; meaning that you can use such syntax all the way from Delphi 1 through Delphi XE. Anyhow, the Caret notation is not well known by all programmers: one good example was myself :-)
So, if you are going to use it, make sure you append a small comment. This comment will allow further readers of your code to understand the syntax on the fly.
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