[badsectoracula]

FWIW that string bit has been solved since Delphi 2 introduced "huge strings", which are basically reference counted, copy-on-write null terminated strings. A variable of type "string" or "ansistring" (the former is an alias for the latter when huge strings are enabled, which are by default in Delphi 2 projects) is actually a pointer to the first character of the null terminated string, making it memory compatible with C calls (the "header" that contains reference count, etc is placed at a negative offset from the pointer).

With modern Delphi and Free Pascal (another object pascal dialect) you rarely have to worry about the differences between ansistrings and C strings.

(the name "ansistring" is kinda odd but blame Borland for that - though the odd name most likely helped avoid conflicts with existing Turbo Pascal and Delphi 1 code)

That said, i wouldn't call modern Pascal a simple language at all. Free Pascal for example has three different object oriented types that are all incompatible with each other and none cover all usage scenarios - and hidden "gotcha"s exist in the language ever since the early Delphi days like the implicit "Result" variable in functions treated as a "var" (passed by reference) parameter, meaning that a call like "Foo:=Bar" where "Foo" is a variable and "Bar" is a function and you'd expect "Bar" to be called and its result assigned to "Foo" actually has "Result" inside "Bar" be whatever "Foo" was because the statement is basically as if "Bar" had a single argument where "Foo" was passed by reference.