[fpc-devel] Unicode support (again)

[Michael Schnell]

> Also, remember unicode is/are a computerlanguage specific 
> specification(s): you may assume that a lot of thought has gone into 
> it to be able to use it with programming languages. That was the 
> design goal. The specification is, alas, rather complex but it 
> contains every bit of information to be able to implement high level 
> handling without breaking properly designed older high level 
> languages. This goes at the expense of lower level string handling 
> (and asm constructs that were introduced just for string handling in 
> the instruction sets of most modern processors!) . I guess that is 
> just what we call progress.
What do you want to say by this ? (Of course the general user is not 
supposed to do ASM code for string handling.)

With Lazarus even:

s: WideString;

s := 'äüö';

does not work (i.e. result in an utf-16 (or UCS2) coded word array 
containing the appropriate three unicode characters

and if you create an utf-16 coded WideString s that contains the three 
unicode characters äöü

caption := s;

does not work either (i.e. the From caption does not show äöü)

We all know why this is the case, but the knowledge does not really help.

The "case" example shows more issues.

-Michael