No, it happens with static arrays, if you set pia := @ia, ia[x] and
pia[x] will give you the same result (in delphi mode, at least).
It's simply more readable and a shortcut.
It's definitely the opposite: It is *less* readable
This is your opinion :) To my experience faking arrays with dyn. size by
using array declarations with infinite size (else you get in trouble
with range checking) are much more error prone and unreadable than using
pointers with an implicit dereference operator as arrays. As soon as you
start using them like normal arrays (new, high, sizeof, passing them to
open array parameters, no range checking) you get burned as well, even
not taking care the extra declarations you need.
What has the one thing to do with the other? It would have been easy to
introduce dynamic arrays without hiding away its nature from the user.
E.g. ansi- and widestrings or classes use implicit dereferencing as well
and they proved to work very well. If someone uses low level operations
like Move he should know what he does.
That's just the point: Most users are left unclear about the nature of
data structures and they start doing an trial and error approach
(changing syntax as long as it is compiled). Then hope it will do what
they intented. That's exactly C-style! Of course, there are some that
look under the hood and know about the details and only these people are
able to avoid such things as memory leaks or pointers pointing to freed
memory and so on. The others stumble through it praying that it runs and
as long as 80% procent works they are already satisfied. That's not the
spirit of Pascal. The language should be clear and predictable from the
start.
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