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/ _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel