[fpc-devel] ansistrings and widestrings

[Peter Vreman]

> in wondows terminology (which i presume is where the name ansistring comes
> from) the windows code page which is often refered to in documentation as
> the ansi code page CAN be multi byte.
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/WinCP.mspx
>
> more generally i belive an ansistring is usually intended to represent
> text
> in the platforms local encoding. Whilst a widestring is meant to represent
> text in utf-16.
>
> The platforms local encoding may be a single byte encodeing (iso-8859-?
> windows-125? etc) it may be a legacy mixed width encoding (EUC-??
> SHIFT-JIS
> BIG5 etc) or it may be a unicode transformation format which is a superset
> of ascii (utf-8).
>
> now for dependency reasons i belive that the default conversion functions
> should remain a "dumb fallback" BUT i also belive that the function
> prototypes should be designed in such a way as to allow the conversion
> routines to be replaced with ones that can sesiblly handle the local
> encoding.
>
> i've created a page on the wiki for this issue at
> http://www.freepascal.org/wiki/index.php/Widestrings

You are welcome to supply patches that fixes the prototypes and new units
that support more encoding/decoding routines.