[fpc-pascal] specify variable name with string variable

[zh loza]

Hi all! It's my first answer to the mailing list, hopefully I won't
screw anything up.

On Sun, Jul 7, 2019 at 10:58 PM James Richters
<james at productionautomation.net> wrote:
>
> This might sound silly,  but is it possible to somehow specify a variable with a string containing the name of the variable?

You might want to try using generic dictionaries. E.g. like this:

program Project1;
uses
  SysUtils, Generics.Collections;

type
  TVariableDictionary = specialize TDictionary<String, PWord>;

var
  MyDictionary: TVariableDictionary;
  MyVariable1: Word;

begin
  MyDictionary := TVariableDictionary.Create;
  MyDictionary.Add('MyVariable1', @MyVariable1);
  MyDictionary['MyVariable1']^ := 100;
  WriteLn(MyVariable1);
  WriteLn(MyDictionary['MyVariable1']^);
  FreeAndNil(MyDictionary);
end.

If you need to address variables of different type, try Variants (
https://wiki.freepascal.org/Variant ).