[fpc-devel] String and UnicodeString and UTF8String

[Michael Schnell]

On 01/11/2011 05:19 PM, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
>
> IMO a single encoding, i.e. UTF-8, can cover all cases.

Of course you are right here, but there are some things to be considered:

In Windows (and maybe elsewhere, too) a two-Byte API (e.g. UTF-16) needs 
to be used, forcing lots of conversions when doing GUI applications.

_All_ beginners will use s[i] and expect to get a character without any 
afterthought. They will be very disappointed when not using English if 
they get bytes instead of characters. The count of the frustrated will 
be much smaller (but >Zero) when doing Widestring/Widechar and they get 
Words instead of Characters.

Eliminating the s[i] syntax would trash  a lot of legacy code and the 
decent replacement (finding the correct character and moving it into a 
DWord in UCS4) is slow and still does not handle all the funny Unicode 
character-combining stuff. But the count of frustrated beginners might 
be further reduced.

-Michael