Initialising dynamic arrays - take 2

In my earlier post on this subject I presented some methods to use to initialise and clone dynamic arrays. Some comments to that post suggested a simpler approach using compiler features I didn't know existed. In this post I've simply collected the information from those comments together in one place.

To initialise an array from literal values you can use the special array constructor provided by the compiler:

uses
  Types;

var
  A: TIntegerDynArray;
begin
  A := TIntegerDynArray.Create(1,2,3,4);
  ...
end;

This also works when you define your own array types, for example:

var
  TMyByteArray = array of Byte;
begin
  A := TMyByteArray.Create(1,2,3,4);
  ...
end;

And it also works for the TArray<T> generic array type:

var
  IntArray: TArray<Integer>;
  StrArray: TArray<string>;
begin
  IntArray := TArray<Integer>.Create(1, 2, 3);
  StrArray := TArray<string>.Create('bonnie', 'clyde');
  ...
end;

The above constructors will only initialise an array from constant values. To make a copy of an existing dynamic array we can use a single parameter version of the Copy procedure as follows:

uses
  Types;

var
  A1, A2: TIntegerDynArray;
begin
  A1 := TIntegerDynArray.Create(1,2,3,4);
  A2 := Copy(A1);
  ...
end;

So we don't really need the TArrayEx.CloneArray<T> method I presented in the earlier post because Delphi already has the functionality built in. Duh!

Thanks a lot to Chris who commented on the original post to point these matters out.

Source code highlighting by DelphiDabbler PasHi.

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