Delphi's TStringList is a very powerful class, as is its ancestor, TStrings. There is, however, one "gotcha:" A very large StringList can bog down performance if its Sorted property is True while you add items.  See this tidbit for a tip on maximizing StringList performance.

In addition to name/value pairs, TStrings offers another item member, Object.  Object is a pointer to which you can assign just about anything.  One handy trick is to cast a data table's row's integer primary key to a pointer, and store it in your TStrings.Objects.  Later, you can cast the Object[i] pointer back to an integer to retrieve the PK. This is very useful in ListBoxes, ComboBoxes, etc.; any component with a TStrings member.

Another Delphi candidate to stand in for an associative array is TObjectList. It holds a list of pointers to any object you care to create.  If you have a class with multiple members, you can associate many values - of many different types - in your class instances, then put them in a TObjectList.

One important Boolean propety of TObjectList is OwnsObjects.  If set to True, your TObjectList instance will free the objects it stores when it is freed, as well as upon some other operations (see Delphi help for details). If False, it's up to you to free all the objects - probably before freeing the ObjectList.

The downside (an upside in some cases) to TObjectList is that it has no predefined sorting mechanism, which makes sense, because it really has no idea what it contains.  You'll have to write your own "Compare," a TListSortCompare function.  Again, see Delphi help.

Thanks Wes for adding to this code snippet. Mucho appreciated!

Newbie posting, so please revise or move if desired:

What Wes was referring to about freeing objects within a list manually is shown below using a combo box, for example, as a list type item holding objects within itself.

class procedure TUtils.FreeAndNilComboBoxObjects(p_cboWork: TComboBox);
{
  Pass in the combo box, and this will clear any objects 

  within the combo box
}
var
  nCount: integer;
begin
  for nCount := 0 to (p_cboWork.Items.Count - 1) do
  begin
    if (p_cboWork.Items.Objects[nCount] <> nil) then
    begin
      p_cboWork.Items.Objects[nCount].free;
      p_cboWork.Items.Objects[nCount] := nil;
    end;
  end;
end;

String Grids can hold objects too, here is sample code

  for nCount := 0 to (p_sgdWork.RowCount - 1) do
  begin
    if (p_sgdWork.objects[0,nCount] <> nil) then
    begin
      p_sgdWork.objects[0,nCount].free;
      p_sgdWork.objects[0,nCount] := nil;
    end;
  end;

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