> C# strings and arrays were also almost a carbon copy of Java
You'd be surprised but .NET and Java strings have a lot of differences. In Java, String is a class which wraps byte[], in .NET - string is a "FieldSeq" object with characters stored inline. One indirection less but with no special fields and cached state like in Java.
Arrays have significant differences too, where Java arrays do not implement any actual collection interfaces - they are just contiguous chunks of elements with an indexer and length field and need to be asList'ed, so it's common to consider in Java to rely on arrays an anti-pattern, which is the opposite to C# arrays, which implement the full set of System.Collections.Generic interfaces.
We're talking about the original .NET 1.x here, not the current state of affairs.
In any case, what I'm talking about is not so much implementation details as user-observable semantics. .NET strings are pretty much exactly like Java strings in that regard - it's an immutable reference type that is a sequence of UTF-16 codepoints. In contrast, strings in Delphi are mutable value types (implemented using copy-on-write with refcounting).
Similarly for arrays, while Delphi has Pascal-style fixed-size arrays that are value types, both C# and Java have arrays as a reference type with null as a distinct value from empty array. The other point of similarity is that both C# and Java treat arrays of objects as covariant, even though it's not actually typesafe (and triggers runtime exceptions if you try to put the wrong type into the array).
You'd be surprised but .NET and Java strings have a lot of differences. In Java, String is a class which wraps byte[], in .NET - string is a "FieldSeq" object with characters stored inline. One indirection less but with no special fields and cached state like in Java.
Arrays have significant differences too, where Java arrays do not implement any actual collection interfaces - they are just contiguous chunks of elements with an indexer and length field and need to be asList'ed, so it's common to consider in Java to rely on arrays an anti-pattern, which is the opposite to C# arrays, which implement the full set of System.Collections.Generic interfaces.