[fpc-devel] Re: enumerators

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2010, Marco van de Voort wrote:

>> Furthermore I think that in detail Unicode string handling should not be
>> based on single characters at all, but instead should use (sub)strings
>> all over, covering multibyte character representations, ligatures etc.
>> as well
>
> This is dog slow. You can make such library for special purposes, but for
> most day to day use this is overkill.
>
> The most common stringoperations that the avg programmer does is searching for
> substrings and then split on them, something that can be perfectly done in
> UTF-8.
>
>> Then the basic operations would be insertion and deletion of
>> substrings, in addition to substring extraction and concatenation.
>
> Basic operations with capital B yes, string support like in a Basic
> interpreter.

Indeed. Javascript uses the 'substrings only' approach. Can't get more slow
than that :(

Probably the reason they injected regular expression treatment in the language;
To make some things at least acceptably fast.

But in general there is something to say for Hans-peter's statements.
Fixed-length character encoding simply make more sense from a computing 
point of view.

Michael.