> On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Marco van de Voort <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Well, euh, the main reason is that euh, most programs and data on the > > system uses > > the system encoding? > > So you are saying that FPC should privilege platform-specific software > development to cross-platform software development?
No, we should privilege cross-platform software development over an portable emulation of a 3rd platform (the Java principle). > This is in the inverse direction of all other cross-platform development > platforms in existence. I'm only having FPC and Lazarus requirements on the table here. I don't care about the others. They have other starting points (being very unix or windows centric, or work with portable sandboxes) > If you are writting cross-platform software you will wish to avoid as > much as possible the system routines, and a known encoding is good. > > Florian's proposal shines here. You get the string with no conversion > and a marker for the encoding, so you can convert it to whatever you > want easily. And in my case you specify you want UTF-16 by making the parameter "utfstring16", and the compiler inserts a conversion for you if sb calls it with a utfstring8. No manual runtime check necessary. > But it doesn't solve the TStringList problem, because there you have > no parameters to know the encoding of the file being loaded. No there is no solution for that except making the string type really fat. Which is not our way. > > Then I'd say you convert. But that is the point. The need for conversion > > should be > > the exception (different from the default system encoding), not the rule. > > I think there should be no conversion at all (unless explicitly asked) > in the contents of the stringlist. Well, that means the tstringlist is a blind store without any methods. It isn't since any operation requires knowledge about the insides. > >> In my system I propose that simply a TWideStringList be implemented, > >> so both ways of storing data are available everwhere. > > > > But I don't have an utf-8 type in your system to operate on. > > How do you know what I want to do with the data? Does it matter? I just want to be able to tailor to the most common scenario's. See my other msg that restates the proposal in simpler terms. > Or save them back to another file? (or any operations which don't involve > system routines which need a specific string encoding) You've really lost me now. I think you are still confusing general unicodestrings with unicodifying a few filename using routines. _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
