[fpc-devel] Unicode and UTF8String

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Tue, 2 Dec 2008, schreef Michael Schnell:

>
>> Nobody talks in this case about UTF-8. Even *ANSIstrings* in there
>> native meaning can contain multi byte chars, there are *multi byte* ansi
>> char sets.
> If there is a widely used multi-byte ANSI encoding, why so we need Unicode  ?
>
> IMHO the introduction of Unicode has been necessary as (like you suggested) 
> multi-byte ANSI encoding was commonly ignored nearly completely and there 
> never has been _compiler_ support for them.

What compiler support should be necessary to handle i.e. EUC-JP? You want 
a variable of type char to contain the JIS-0213 coordinates?

Unicode, and in particular UTF-8, has not taken off either because 
languages got support for it. In fact, the most common language, C, has no 
string support at all.

One reason Unicode has taken off because of document exchange, which in 
the internet age got very common. Another reason is the growing importance 
of the Far East, developers want therefore better support for the Far East 
languages, but note this Unicode motivation exists mainly for Western 
software developers.

Daniël