[fpc-devel] Unicode support (yet again)

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

cobines schrieb:
> 2011/9/15 Michael Schnell <mschnell at lumino.de>:
>> Of course. But generations of Pascal programmers have been trained to do
>>
>> MyChar := MyString[1];
> 
> Such people should retrain if they want to switch to Unicode using
> some instructions how to convert your application. If they do not
> want, they should stay with Ansi. There is no automatic switch your
> application to Unicode.

I see no reason to change application code a lot, when strings only are 
read and displayed - no need ever to deal with single characters. But 
even more sophisticated apps can be happy with every string encoding, 
when they e.g. break strings at whitespace or other separators, and 
string concatenation is no special problem at all. Even string sorting 
and comparison (table/db lookup) is independent from the encoding.

Only when an application must *interpret* strings in foreign languages, 
to e.g. break words, the coder has to learn everything about every 
*language* to be supported, before he can start to write according code. 
Such code requires *more* than only knowledge about Unicode and encodings.

DoDi