[fpc-devel] Unicode support (yet again)

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 14/09/2011 19:17, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> 
> How many users will have to deal with chars outside the Unicode BMP?

You  are very  narrow  minded! It  depends on  the  application you  are
developing. Lets  take   a  Science  application  as   an  example. Many
scientific  symbols  fall  outside  the BMP. Now  lets  take  a  another
example. Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Or a Music  program. Or your next version
of Skype or some IM app using all those emoticons.

Looking at  the following  chart [see  url below],  Emoticons, Transport
and  Map  symbols,  Alchemical   Symbols,  Pictographs,  Playing  Cards,
Mathematical symbols etc all fall outside the BMP. There are all symbols
that could quite easily  be used in a variety of  applications - so yes,
accessing symbols in Plane 1- 14 is rather important!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Multilingual_Plane#Supplementary_Multilingual_Plane

The applications  we develop at our  work use symbols outside  the BMP -
Maths, Science, Alchemical etc..


> outside the  BMP UTF-8  is a  waste of space,  and lacks  indexed char
> access in any case.

Yeah, and indexed  access for UTF-16 encoded strings needs  to check for
surrogate  pairs too! Otherwise  your  app is  not  Unicode enabled  but
rather UCS-2 only.

And  considering the  amount  of  text processing  apps  I have  written
(plenty of them), indexed character access  is really not a top priority
or a often used feature.

Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/