[fpc-devel] Is calling the Windows Unicode APIs really faster than the ANSI API's?

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Daniël Mantione said:
> > That's highly dependant on what you application does!  If your
> > application primarily parses text files, it's relevant. :-)
> 
> Shortstrings & ansistrings won't go away. You'll still be able to code 
> fast text file parsers. Note that in such cases your application won't 
> process unicode, taking the numbers example again: As soon as your 
> application accepts arabic numbers everywhere western numbers are allowed, 
> you want the parsing to happen in UTF-16.

Accepting both Arabic and Westernized Arabic numerals would possibly break a
lot of code anyway, since to string and back wouldn't be reversible. (it
actually already isn't with Delphi I know, due to hex and padding handling,
but this would be a magnitude worse)

You can't seperate val from str, and what would str(100,s) do?