[fpc-devel] new string - question on usage

[Jonas Maebe]

On 12 Oct 2011, at 09:56, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> If it was just one class it would work. But essentially it is all  
> OOP. (e.g.
> tcomponent and tcontrol has string properties, and thus the whole of
> lazarus),

Lazarus doesn't have to change anything. They are free to follow the  
path you proposed for FPC: ship two completely separate LCLs (one  
compiled with string = unicodestring and one compiled with string =  
ansistring).

> same for the OOP parts of packages/ It would also mean rewriting
> delphi code using such schemes to be encoding agnostic to follow this.

If a class in the RTL or packages is by nature already encoding- 
agnostic, the rewriting would consist of this:

type
   tcomponent =  
FpcStringModeDifferentiatedType(tansicomponent,tunicodecomponent);

   generic tgenericcomponent<T> = class
     ..
   end;

   tansicomponent = specialize tcomponent<ansistring>;
   tunicodecomponent = specialize tcomponent<unicodestring>;

(or use the Delphi variant of the generic syntax). That would indeed  
require some ifdefs to keep the code compilable also by Delphi. No  
solution will be completely free.


Jonas