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4-2 Delphi Language Guide
Fundamental syntactic elements
Special symbols
Special symbols are non-alphanumeric characters, or pairs of such characters, that
have fixed meanings. The following single characters are special symbols.
#$&'()*+,–./:;<=>@[]^{}
The following character pairs are also special symbols.
(* (. *) .) .. // := <= >= <>
The left bracket [ is equivalent to the character pair of left parenthesis and period (.
The right bracket ] is equivalent to the character pair of period and right parenthesis
.)
The left brace { is equivalent to the character pair of left parenthesis and asterisk (*.
The right brace } is equivalent to the character pair of right parenthesis and asterisk *)
Note %, ?, \, !, " (double quotation marks), _ (underscore), | (pipe), and ~ (tilde) are not
special characters.
Identifiers
Identifiers denote constants, variables, fields, types, properties, procedures,
functions, programs, units, libraries, and packages. An identifier can be of any
length, but only the first 255 characters are significant. An identifier must begin with
a letter or an underscore (_) and cannot contain spaces; letters, digits, and
underscores are allowed after the first character. Reserved words cannot be used as
identifiers.
Since the Delphi Language is case-insensitive, an identifier like CalculateValue could
be written in any of these ways:
CalculateValue
calculateValue
calculatevalue
CALCULATEVALUE
On Linux, the only identifiers for which case is important are unit names. Since unit
names correspond to file names, inconsistencies in case can sometimes affect
compilation (see “Unit references and the uses clause” on page 3-5).
Table 4.1 Equivalent symbols
Special symbol Equivalent symbols
[(.
].)
{(*
]*)