[fpc-devel] Unicode support - for the 20th time... ;-)

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Daniël Mantione said:
> >> If you want to help, we need to implement the Delphi 2009 encoding aware 
> >> string type, both runtime support as well as the compiler support.
> > A previous discussion showed that this also breaks a lot of old code and is 
> > not really nice.
> 
> As I understand it, the incompatibility from Delphi 2009 comes from the 
> fact that and char string by default has becomes 2 bytes, not by adding 
> encoding information to the type.

Yes. The added strings are perfectly compatible. (ansistring for 1 byte
encodings unicodestring for 2 byte encodings)  The incompatible part comes
from switching the default string/char type to the 2 byte variants.

> > So a better concept seems to have a dedicated type for any possible Coding 
> > (ANSISTring <of course locale-depending>, UTF8String, UTF16String, maybe 
> > UCS2String, too) and let the user choose (e.g. by a "{$" compiler option) 
> > which one he want to be used for "String" and "WideString". This would allow 
> > for simple compiler magic to perform any necessary conversion (including 
> > assigning constants).
> 
> Isn't this the same??

Typing wise it is the same. (except for the nonexistance of UCS2),
implementation wise not.

But Michael obviously hasn't read the PDF.