I have a program which creates a large number of instances of the same
class. There are several data elements used by the class which may
vary from instance to instance of the program, but never change in a
specific instance. It seems wasteful to store identical copies of the
data elements in each instance of the class, but I can't figure out a
good way for the class instances to share the data in an OOPily
correct way. In C++, I'd probably declare them as static data members,
and fill them in before the first instantiation of the class, but
there doesn't seem to be a Delphi/OP equivalent.

At the moment I have a pointer to a record containing the shared data
as a field of the class, but this isn't very satisfying. Any better
ideas? Why were static data members omitted in Delphi BTW?

Steve Austin
saus...@terra.nlnet.nf.ca