[fpc-devel] Unicode RTL

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:36:27 +0100 (CET)
Daniël Mantione <daniel.mantione at freepascal.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> Op Wed, 16 Nov 2005, schreef Mattias Gaertner:
> 
> > I don't understand, why you connect UTF8 with 'ignorant of MBCS'.
> > UCS-2 can be used as ignorant as UTF8.
> > Even UCS-4 and UTF32 will not solve all problems. Think about arabic
> > RTL.
> 
> Sure. I am not against UTF-8 or something (if you got that impression). 
> What I did note though is that adding UTF-8 (or widestring, it doesn't 
> matter) would mean doubling a lot of code, while with a separate RTL 
> would prevent, there would be single code that can be compiled for 
> multiple targets.
> 
> > > In other words, you still need to duplicate an awfull lot of code.
> > 
> > That is the same for 8bit and widestring.
> 
> No, that is not true. There would be two rtls based on the same code.

Can you give some examples, what parts of the RTL should change for
widestring?

 
> > > What convinced me two rtl's might be a better choice, is that many of
> > > the  source code remains intact and does not need to be duplicated.
> > > New code  could take advantage immedeately. The decision wether the
> > > code is going to be used in an 8-bit environment (i.e. MS-DOS) and
> > > will be 8-bit, or in a  Unicode environment (i.e. Windows NT) and will
> > > be 16-bit a character, is  solved by a few ifdefs. There won't even be
> > > any overhead on the MS-DOS  executables (allthough the programmer can
> > > use widestrings if he wishes  so).
> > 
> > Please: No two RTLs.
> 
> A separate RTL is not my proposal, but the idea isn't that stupid.
> 
> I am not going to push anything.


Mattias