[fpc-devel] Unicode and UTF8String

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:50:11 +0000
Martin Friebe <fpc at mfriebe.de> wrote:

> Mattias Gaertner wrote:
>[...]
> Yes I agree, and said so before: If a rtl function is going to pass
> on the data to the OS, and conversation is always needed, then no 
> overloading is needed. Use RTLString.
> 
> If an function does not use the OS (e.g extract file-path or name)
> then no internal conversion is needed. Therefore overloaded functions
> would give benefit to some programmers. (to name one group: most
> beginners, who have more than enough to worry about; and will be glad
> if strings are kept simple to use ( a fixed known type, not a type
> that looks somehow abstract, because you do not know its
> implementation at the time you write your code)

True.

 
> >> [...]
> >> Also it would be nice (so I do not know how) not to have to
> >> duplicate code, in order to archive this. Something like generics,
> >> maybe. 
> >
> > The goal of RTLString is to avoid duplicate code in the RTL.
> >   
> Yes I acknowledged that this would be a problem. And also RTLString
> has the benefit, of allowing unicode fpc to be available far earlier
> than it would otherwise.
> 
> The question remains, could it then be extended/optimized? Maybe a 
> generic like template (for functions, instead of objects)? Which
> needs to be written only once, and the will be specialized for each
> string type?

Yes. 
I wonder, how many are there that really need this?
Can you estimate?

Mattias