[Lazarus] Does Lazarus support a complete Unicode Component Library?

[Marco van de Voort]

On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 11:22:43PM +0200, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> > The type name might come from Delphi compatibility (tada!).
> 
> And once again for someone as myself, not using Delphi, it is quite
> ridiculous too see the errors the Free Pascal project makes

It doesn't. You just assume nobody thought about it before you, and that it
is an error. Moreover, you also assume that everybody has the same
sensitivities as you about certain topics, and again that is wrong.

> (or should that rather be the errors Delphi makes) in such cases/examples. 
> Trying to fool all developers into thinking that "unicode" [as in
> UnicodeString type] only means UTF-16, because indecently that is what
> Microsoft uses in its Windows OS. 

We would never try to "fool" anybody to think such a thing. Please stop
putting words in our mouths.

> Maybe the code-page enabled string type (cpstrnew branch) will use
> some more "sane" name for its string type, or redefine the standard
> String type to mean a code page / encoding enabled string type instead
> of String = AnsiString.

This is all undecided. I lean towards splitting operating system targets
into a utf8 and a utf16 one for most platforms(*), since nobody will ever agree
on one encoding.  Not even per platform.

(*) and a legacy "ansi" one if need be.
 
> > And currently UTF8String is defined as AnsiString, so there is currently no
> > difference
> 
> That's what I thought. So why did they [FPC team] actually bother to
> create the UTF8String type then?

It's an alias for literal programming purposes. You can see from the
typename what a procedure expects, and it goes into the documentation