[fpc-devel] ansistrings and widestrings

[Alexey Barkovoy]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "peter green" <plugwash at bircd.org>
To: "FPC developers' list" <fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org>
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 7:24 PM
Subject: RE: [fpc-devel] ansistrings and widestrings


> it should be noted that pascal classes are really not suited to doing
> strings.
>
> to do strings with classes you really need language features which fpc
> doesn't have.
>
> doing strings with non garbage collected heap based classes would make
> something that was as painfull to work with as pchars and that was totally
> different from any string handling pascal has seen before.

Yes, classes are not suitable here, but FPC already allows mechanizm to redefine 
string handling with Get / SetWideStringManager. This can be extended / reworked 
to include short, wide and ansi string comparition routines.

> just as pascal doesn't consider two strings with different cases to be equal
> it should probbablly not consider two strings of unicode code points to be
> equal unless they are binary equivilent.

But comparision is not only equal / nonequal, but  "bigger" and "lesser" too !