[fpc-devel] Unicode support (yet again)

[Jonas Maebe]

On 16 Sep 2011, at 12:38, Marco van de Voort wrote:

>> What do you think about adding TStringsUTF8/TStringListUTF8 to  
>> classes.pas?
>
> I think this is a slippery slope. These kinds of hacks are slipped  
> in one by
> one, and each one is only a small concession, but in the end it is a
> disaster. I don't want to create and maintain UTF8 versions of  
> nearly every
> class, even when the class doesn't actually do anything UTF8 specific.

If we support an UTF-8 version of the RTL, then either the code must  
work both for UTF-16 and UTF-8, or it has to be separately maintained  
anyway. And if the code works for both types, generics should enable  
having both without source code duplication.

Note that I'm not specifically arguing here for adding them or not,  
but I don't think the maintenance will be much higher than what will  
be imposed already by requiring that the RTL be compilable for both  
UTF-8 and UTF-16.


Jonas