[fpc-devel] Unicode support (yet again)

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho said:
> 
> Following from a discussion on mac-pascal, I'd like to propose a
> solution for Unicode support.

First and for all. Backwards compat dropping is not going to happen. If we
were planning that, we had changed everything to something unicode years
ago.
 
> Function FileOpen (Const FileName : utf8string; Mode : Integer) :
> THandle; overload;
> Function FileOpen (Const FileName : unicodestring; Mode : Integer) :
> THandle; overload;

> and similarly for other places and everyone should be happy.

This is not a solution. This is a temporary hack to alieve some perceived
Lazarus pain, and doesn't fix my main gripe of the manual conversions
everywhere. It is is a hack for 0.01% of the unicode problem.

IMHO the objective should be to mimize manual conversions (and with that the
fact that generic code becomes encoding specific).