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).
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).