[fpc-devel] The (near) future of strings

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Michael Van Canneyt said:
> >
> > However in Michael's scheme with Sysutils using Ansi and System.Sysutils
> > using unicodestring this will fail.
> 
> Why would this fail ? All we need to do is introduce -NS ?

If you have a mix of generations (as is currently possible with Delphi), how
do you avoid linking in two different sysutils?
 
> And obviously the 2 RTLs cannot be mixed.

Correct. And if they only differ in name, dotted or not, and you can
set namespaces to override the dots, how do you keep them apart?

> > Worse, one mistake in your sources (e.g. a non qualified forms) and you get
> > bunches of "Incompatible Type Forms.TForm, expected VCL.Forms.TForm" style errors.
> >
> > I think some solution with alternative -Fu settings is to be prefered and
> > not abuse an unrelated feature (dotted unitnames) to have both ansi an
> > unicodestrings in one install.
> 
> The alternative is 4 rtls.
> 
> Dotted, ansi
> not dotted, ansi
> 
> Dotted, unicode
> not dotted, unicode.
> 
> which is clear nonsense.

No, two rtls, both dotted, with namespace if needed. Which is the same as
what you propose, just kept physically apart.