Oh fair enough I was going off some page I googled in terms of Assigned which showed three definitions, just checked in FPC and yes it's built in.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4...ssigned-vs-nil

May as well use assigned. doesn't make a blind bit of difference really. If you're dealing with method pointers to methods that return pointers/objects then using assigned will help you avoid making mistakes I suppose but if you were doing that and used pointers / nil comparisons a lot then you wouldn't make that mistake anyway. Well you'd hope