[fpc-devel] Unicodestring branch, please test and help fixing

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2008, Anton Kavalenka wrote:

> Florian Klaempfl wrote:
> > I've continued to work on support of an unicodestring type in fpc. It's
> > currently in an svn branch at:
> > http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/fpc/branches/unicodestring
> > and will be merged later to trunk. The unicodestring type is a ref. counted
> > utf-16 string. On non-windows, widestring is mapped to this type. If you're
> > interested in unicode support please test, give feedback here and submit
> > fixes.
> >
> > An existing working copy of trunk can be switched to this branch by
> > cd fpc
> > svn switch http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/fpc/branches/unicodestring
> > and back with
> > svn switch http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/fpc/trunk
> > _______________________________________________
> > fpc-devel maillist  -  fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org
> > http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
> >
> The Pascal huge strings always annoy me.
> Since - it is IMPLICIT automatic object with set of overloaded methods, length
> and reference count fields etc hidden from developer.
> 
> In near future we geat a Zoo of the strings:
> AnsiString, WideString, UnicodeString, ShortString, PWideChar, PChar
> Some of them with encoding field.
> 
> Why not to make it EXPLICIT object
> 
> s:=TCoolFPCString.Create('Test');

Nothing stops you from doing this yourself.

But for something as basic as text operations, I think this is bloat.

Imagine that you would have to do
  I:=TInteger.Create(1);
  J:=TInteger.Create(2);
  I.Add(J);
What kind of language do you end up with then ? Utterly unreadable, and 
slow, because heavily relying on the heap.

Michael.