[fpc-devel] Unicode support (again)

[Jonas Maebe]

On 11 Nov 2008, at 13:56, Michael Schnell wrote:

> If this really is two codes for the same unicode character, the  
> "friendly old school" handling function should normalize it. If  
> someone really needs to take the differences into account (like with  
> the case you described), he ought to do the appropriate code  
> (handling subcodes).

It was just one example. Look at Peter Green's mail for others. The  
run time library (with the help of complex routines) can indeed just  
destroy all data of which it thinks that you do not care about when  
using "friendly string" handling (because it is not representable in  
some ISO ansi encoding that the developer is familiar with), but in  
that case you will probably end up with something that turns out to be  
useful for only a very limited number of people, and which in the real  
world comes crashing down horribly all the time. Yet, it will require  
an enormous amount of implementation work to actually support all this  
alleged friendliness

If people want to rely on what they are used to in non-unicode  
environments, then they cannot directly use unicode strings. They'll  
first have to assign it or typecast it to a non-unicode string and  
then operate on that string. At least if there's any data loss in that  
case, the programmer has full responsibility and knows (or should  
know) the risks.


Jonas