[fpc-devel] Unicode support (yet again)

[Martin Schreiber]

On Wednesday 14 September 2011 17:02:14 Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho schrieb:
> > On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:23 PM, Michael Van Canneyt
> > 
> > <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
> >> One with unicode string, one with ansistring. They will have the same
> >> code, but will be compiled twice, each time with a different compiler
> >> define to decide which version it must be.
> > 
> > Is this possible in UNIX? I can see that in Windows you can use the
> > trick to use W versions which are identical except for the string type
> > and drop Windows 9x support, but is this really possible for the UNIX
> > syscalls? They expect UTF-8 not UTF-16 which is what UnicodeString
> > uses.
> 
> A few topics:
> 
[...]

Agreed. And so it is made in MSEgui:

- On user side all stringhandling uses type "msestring" which is 
defined as the existing Free Pascal 16bit  UnicodeString.
- The MSEgui widgetset works with UnicodeString too.
- For file and directory access MSEgui has a set of functions which convert 
from/to system encoding to/from type "filenamety" which is defined as existing 
Free Pascal 16bit  UnicodeString.
- MSEgui has own 16bit functions and classes for lists, maps, sorting and the 
like.
- Text files are stored in utf-8 by default.

From my point of view there is no need for a complicated encoding aware 
unicode string type which possibly is slower, needs more memory and  
introduces new bugs.
  
Martin