[fpc-devel] FPC 2.3.1 seems a mixed mess with Unicode support

[Jonas Maebe]

On 15 Sep 2009, at 14:47, Martin Schreiber wrote:

> On Tuesday 15 September 2009 14:34:52 Jonas Maebe wrote:
>>
>> I don't think that the default source code encoding has ever been
>> changed. And the way to specify it is also quite old already.
>>
> Wasn't a string constant containing a character > #127 treated as  
> widestring
> earlier?

I don't think so. There was the following behaviour, but that was a  
bug: <http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_Trunk#Encoding_of_single-character_constants_assigned_to_widestring 
 >. That change in itself was due to <http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.2.2#Char_to_WideChar_conversions_and_vice_versa 
 >, but that had nothing to do with Lazarus.

That change dates from August 2007, and was due to <http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=7758 
 >. Another thing that was changed at the same time, was that
a) *if* a string was parsed as widestring (e.g., if you have  
{$codepage utf-8} and the string has characters > #127),
/and/
b) you directly assigned this constant widestring to an ansistring in  
the program

then the compiler would no longer "convert" this constant widestring  
to an "ansistring" at compile time, but instead insert a call to the  
widestring manager to convert it at run time. The reason was not  
Lazarus, but simply because the compiler doesn't have a clue about  
what the actual code page of the ansistring will be at run time in the  
first place

I believe it just replaced all characters > #127 with '?' at compile  
time before.


Jonas