[fpc-devel] Unicode support (yet again)

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:46 AM,  <michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be> wrote:
>> Can you clarify a bit. When you say "unicode string" to you mean UTF-16
>> (Delphi's definition of a unicode string), or do you mean a Unicode
>> string in the true sense - it can be utf-8 or utf-16 etc depending on
>> the platform's native encoding.
>
> This has not yet been decided.

IMHO a platform-dependent string would be the worse solution of all
... far worse then migrating to UTF-16.

It adds tiny bit of speed while it puts a large development complexity
burdain ... I imagine how one would explain that kind of thing to
newbies ...

Just recently I had a student from my university implement a routine
which converts HTML text from utf-8 to braille in utf-8 ... I didn't
have to explain anything and she could implement it without Pascal
previous experience. I wonder if I had to say: ops, the main string
type is unknown =D To do any operation on it you need to first convert
to something known and then convert back to unknown, while unknown
conversions might take place ...

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho