On 14/09/2011 17:02, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote: > Many users still want simple string handling, with direct mapping > between logical and physical chars (SBCS). This is not possible at all > with UTF-8, while UTF-16 works fine with the BMP, at least.
What rubbish! The only "utf-8 limit" is that the current FPC and Delphi RTL's don't cater for it due to the legacy ANSI support that came before. But then you also forgot that most string manipulation that requires individual "characters" normally process such strings from left-to-right, so again there is NO problem doing that with UTF-8 encoded strings. I've done enough UTF-8 string manipulation to know. > (platform dependent) RTL conventions, but it affects the standard > components (string lists...) in the FCL, and the other components in > the LCL. Please give a concrete example where using platfrom dependent encodings (eg: UnicodeString = UTF-8 on Linux, but UTF-16 on Windows) will cause problems? I really cannot see any issues here, only positives like better performance for each platform due to no need for auto-conversions. > Here again the average user will prefer UTF-16 component libraries, > compatible with his own code, while more experienced users may be > happier with the current UTF-8 libraries. What the hell has "experience" got to do with the preference between UTF-8 and UTF-16? To the developer (and more so to the end-user) a Unicode string should act like any other Unicode string. What encoding is used to represent "hello world" shouldn't even come into question. > English (ASCII) users also may prefer UTF-8, as long as they do not > have to (or want to) deal with strings in foreign languages. Rubbish once again! Our applications use UTF-8, I have no problems writing application that support multiple foreign language - as long as those languages are left-to-right (I don't understand RTL languages, so can't comment). Neither have my users any problems using such application. Hell, they don't even know what Unicode is, or what the word Encoding means - they just see it as text on the screen. And that is how it should be. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
