为什么我的Delphi不接受私下声明中的任何内容？

Question

I am a student and Delphi is not really my primary environment for programming. I know how it works and I'm completely familiar with its layout. I recently received a task in which I have to use arrays in order to list them in a listbox via integer and string. The idea is very simple and the program itself is very easy to make.

The problem comes when I try to declare a constant under the private or public it just shows and error message stating "'END' expected but 'CONST' found". I have worked with public and private variables and constants for a while now but I'm not really sure what's going on.

The code is as follows:

type
  TForm1 = class(TForm)
    edtDateTime: TEdit;
    lstListArrayValues: TListBox;
    gbpIntegerArrayOptions: TGroupBox;
    gbpStringArrayOptions: TGroupBox;
    gbpListBoxOptions: TGroupBox;
    btnInitializeIntArray: TButton;
    btnAssignIntArray: TButton;
    btnDoubleIntArray: TButton;
    btnInitializeStrArray: TButton;
    btnAssignStrArray: TButton;
    btnCapitalStrArray: TButton;
    btnDisplayArray: TButton;
    btnClearListbox: TButton;
    btnDeleteSelected: TButton;
    XPManifest1: TXPManifest;
    procedure FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
    procedure btnInitializeIntArrayClick(Sender: TObject);

    private
    {Private Declarations}
      Const
        nItems = 5;
      var
        nBasicsIntArray : array [0..(nItems - 1)] of integer;
        nBasicsStrArray : array [0..(nItems - 1)] of string;
    public
      { Public declarations }
  end;

When I run the application it says "'END' expected but 'CONST' found". I am using Windows 7 and Delphi 7 and I have not had this problem before.

It could honestly be that I'm missing something stupid but I've overlooked everything and I can't seem to find the cause of the problem.

Answer 1

The ability to declare constants inside a class was not supported in Delphi 7. That language feature was added in a later release.

Declare your constant outside the class.

The same is true of your use of var . That syntax is not supported in Delphi 7. You should simply remove the var keyword from your class declaration.

Answer 2

As written above, a solution can be to move your local constant to global position under Delphi 7. Here is a code sample:

Const
    nItems = 5;
type
  TForm1 = class(TForm)
    edtDateTime: TEdit;
//...
  private
      nBasicsIntArray : array [0..(nItems - 1)] of integer;
      nBasicsStrArray : array [0..(nItems - 1)] of string;
//...
  end;

Also you can use " const " and " type " keywords multiple times to keep things together.