[fpc-pascal] What is already Unicode enabled in 3.1.1?

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

Is there some FPC unicode wiki roadmap / status page? Something like
Lazarus has for it's widgetsets [http://wiki.freepascal.org/Roadmap]

For many years now the tiOPF project has two major versions being
maintained because FPC lagged behind on Delphi's Unicode support. We
have tiOPF2 which works with FPC and Delphi 7-2007, and tiOPF3 which
only works with Delphi 2009 and later.

Today I grabbed the latest FPC 3.1.1 and tried to compile tiOPF3 (which
currently only works with D2009 and later). From the wiki pages I found
that I need to enable {$MODESWITCH UNICODESTRINGS} so that the String
type is interpreted as UnicodeString. This got FPC through a couple of
units.

Now I'm getting an error with a SysUtils function FmtStr()

 tiCommandLineParams.pas(152,18) Error: Call by var for arg no. 1 has to
match exactly: Got "UnicodeString" expected "AnsiString"

The code looks as follows:

function TtiCommandLineParams.GetAsString: string;
var
  LArgIndex, LMAxArgIndex: integer;

begin
  LMAxArgIndex := FCLParams.ParamCount;

  for LArgIndex := 1 to LMAxArgIndex do
    FmtStr(Result, '%s%s ', [Result, FCLParams.ParamStr(LArgIndex)]); //
<<< error here
  Result := Trim(Result);
end;


So it seems the SysUtis doesn't have a UnicodeString version of
FmtStr().  But then I remembered that there was talks about a AnsiString
RTL and a UnicodeString RTL. Is that switch not automatically done if I
use modeswitch UnicodeString? If not, how to I enable the Unicode RTL?

Also I get (as expected) lots of compiler warnings. For example:

tiBaseObject.pas(9,5) Hint: Unit "uuchar" not used in tiBaseObject

tiCommandLineParams.pas(158,34) Warning: Implicit string type conversion
with potential data loss from "UnicodeString" to "AnsiString"

tiCommandLineParams.pas(158,20) Warning: Implicit string type conversion
from "AnsiString" to "UnicodeString"


The "uuchar" is a weird one, because there is no uuchar unit referenced
in any of the uses clauses. So I'm presuming that FPC injects that
automatically - but then why complain about it?


Am I maybe jumping the gun by trying to use FPC 3.1.1 with tiOPF3? Is
FPC's Unicode support not yet in a usable state with Delphi 2009+ code?


Regards,
  - Graeme -

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