[fpc-devel] Unicode support (again)

[Michael Schnell]

> We were talking of a world where strings consist of widechars, not 
> about the current Lazarus, weren't we?
I'm not sure. Of course WideStrings and WideChars are easier to be used, 
as in Europe and America problems with surrogate pairs will seldom 
arise, but IMHO the user should be enabled to define what kind of string 
encoding he uses (UTF-8, UTF-16 or UCS2, trading speed against memory). 
The compiler should do the dirty work of converting automatically.

With that the current Lazarus LCL would be perfectly usable (even if the 
user decides to use UCS2 WideStrings and thus can use WideChars).

OTOH, regarding an improved Lazarus, IMHO he should be enabled to choose 
or compile an LCL version with a UTF16 or UCS2 WideStrings API, for 
improved speed with GUI handling.

-Michael