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

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Op 2011-02-18 14:19, Hans-Peter Diettrich het geskryf:
> Also implied conversions may not be noticeable to many users, and this
> also may apply to a future FPC/Lazarus model.

I've lately had a renewed interest in working on the Unicode for FPC, so
have been silently hammering away at the code in my [limited] spare
time. If all goes to plan, the change-over should be relatively
painless, and more intuitive than Delphi's was. This should also mean
that projects like Lazarus LCL, fpGUI and MSEgui could essentially
switch to simply using the String type instead of custom types like
TfpgString or TMSEString etc., and removing special UTF8* string
functions and replacing them with standard RTL ones. I guess fpGUI will
be the first test case on how successful such a string change-over will
be. :)

The good news is [or at least that is my plan], is that if LCL, fpGUI
and MSEgui still want to use a hard-coded internal string encoding, that
should be simple to accomplish - via something like the following. eg:
for fpGUI it could be...


type
  TfpgString = String<cp_utf8>; // <-- this should be the only change.

var
  MyString: TfpgString;  // this code is as it always was


Introducing a method that could set the default global encoding for
String type (ignoring the OS platform) is also in the plans. I believe
Delphi can do this too.



> BTW I was just about to buy a Delphi XE licencse, just for curiosity,
> but then I noticed that it neither supports multiple platforms nor 64
> bit right now :-(

Yeah, the wait continues...one delay after the next. :-/



Regards,
  - Graeme -

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