...while a TDate is actually a binary floating-point number.
...which is not to be a problem for his stated task to prevent unexperienced users to meaningfully alter files in Notepad.
The other two types, though, were indeed chosen on purpose.
And i did not even started with trees or linked lists of records :-)is actually a pointer to somewhere else in memory (the heap)
...and? What would a novice make out of it?
See, Mark, this still says nothing to novices.
And if you really gonna explain them so they understand - you would eventually have to retell quite few chapters from programming textbooks.
Which, frankly, were written better explanaitons, than your or my ad hoc short forum snippet would ever be.
It is a rabbit hole. So i prefer just to say "don't jump into it".
Isn't a simple RECORD with all the inner fields needed to be enough? It's simple, just load the complete record with simple IO block read or something and directly have the app read from it in real time
...so says Jamie. And novices would trust him and do it.
And when novices would do how Jamie said, he would make U-turn and lash out on them for "simply just loading" because now, after they followed Jamie's advice and ruined their data by simply taking simple record with usual everyday types and simply dumping it with block I/O or something.
Because that was promised to "be enough".
you should know that managed types within a Record is not going to be savable to disk.
But you said it was not so! you said novice should "just load the complete record with simple IO block read" and that's it!