John L. Ries wrote:
There probably wouldn't be anything wrong with GPC automatically setting pointers to nil when disposing them, but that would be non-standard and I suspect that most people (myself included) would do it themselves anyway (for portability's sake) unless the pointer was going to be immediately reassigned.
No, that's perfectly ok with the standard. It simply specifies that the value is undefined, which means set to nil is as good as anything else.
The reason it is not standard to set the value to nil is likely that it is false security. You set the pointer used in the dispose call to nil, but you could have any number of copies running around. Wirth was simply reminding you that it's up to you to manage your pointers in this way.
Scott Moore