Riding the IDE

In a nutshell, Delphi is a program for making other programs. The program responsible for generating executable files from the source code is a compiler. It is typically implemented as a command-line application, but it can also be invoked directly from the IDE. When executing the compiler as a command-line application, you can pass to it command-line parameters. As depicted in Figure 1.6, compilers take different command-line parameters, including the location of source code files necessary to generate the resulting binary file:

Figure 1.6: A simplified compiler architecture

It is possible to write your programs using a text editor such as Notepad and then execute the compiler from the command line, but it is not the most efficient way of creating applications. Most programmers use IDEs to work on apps. The idea of an IDE originates from Delphi’s ancestor – Borland Turbo Pascal, in the 1980s – and it comes from the...