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

[Sven Barth]

On 18.02.2011 15:57, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> 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.

When you're still working on that branch (you got it to compile again?) 
it might indeed be that you fullfill Florian's point of "those who 
implement it decide how it's done" (more or less).

I just got an idea: What about using a more sane way of the Unicode 
string feature in mode (Obj)FPC (like you're trying to implement, 
Graeme), keeping the old way in mode Delphi (String = "RawByteString") 
and introduce a new mode Delphi2009 that tries to be compatible with 
Delphi's Code Page aware string type. Or maybe instead of a new mode 
better add a modeswitch "DelphiCPAwareStrings" (or something like 
this...) that needs to be enabled for code that should be compatible to 
Delphi 2009. Thus users of pre-Delphi2009 could be happy, too.

And yes, I'm aware that this means work. ;)

Just my 2 cents...

Regards,
Sven