“Weak reference”: down to earth explanation needed

Question

Can someone provide an explanation of a weak reference in Delphi?

I noticed that the concept is often mentioned in some library/framework source code I scrutini

Answer 1

See also

Automatic Reference Counting in Delphi Mobile Compilers

which includes documentation of the new [weak] attribute:

Another important concept for ARC is the role of weak references, which you can create by tagging them with [weak] attribute.