[fpc-devel] Russian locale information not compatible with FPC locale variables

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Tue, 29 Jul 2008, schreef Graeme Geldenhuys:

> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl> wrote:
>>>
>>> This is what the Russian user had to revert to, using a normal $20
>>> (space) character.  But seeing that Delphi is now going to be fully
>>> Unicode compliant, surely we need to attend to these issues as well in
>>> FPC - being fully Unicode compliant.
>>
>> And just like Delphi, I think it is better to wait to a major version with
>> proper unicode string support, and do it (mostly) right in one go, instead
>> of little ad-hoc changes to support workarounds.
>
> I did not suggest ad-hoc changes, I meant FPC should fully support
> unicode strings as Delphi is doing in the next release.  Unicode is
> not something new, it's just Delphi that is way behind with their
> implementation compared to the demand, and FPC now seems to be in the
> same boat.  I don't see any point in waiting for Delphi, after all, we
> may NOT look at their implementation anyway!
>
> Is there any FPC discussions as to how this is going to be tackled and
> what implications there are etc..?  Anything I can join?  Any timeline
> for developers to expect unicode support?  Anything we can help test
> or write unit tests for?

It depends on implementation of new widechar based string types, which 
will be supported.

The developers haven't talked about it yet, but I can imagine we will have 
some target platforms where sizeof(char)=1, which would provide for 100% 
compatibility with old code and some platforms where sizeof(char)=2, which 
will provide the unicode support for the future.

For the time being you can prepare your own code by adding:

type  char=widechar;
       string=widestring;

... at the top of your files

By the way, I do believe we need to be Delphi compatible here and thus 
know their implementation. Code exchange between Delphi & FPC otherwise 
becomes too hard for people.

Daniël