[Lazarus] cwstring in arm-linux

[Žilvinas Ledas]

Hello,

On 2011-10-21 10:43, Michael Schnell wrote:
> Of course you are right, but "move" and friends is "hardware-near 
> programming" for this who know what they are doing. but basic (legacy) 
> string operations like "myChar := myString[i]" is "office-level 
> programming" and thus should work as a dummy expects.
>

What if a file on the user computer has 4byte [visible] character as 8th 
character and you, for example want to get 8 character file name? In 
this case you split that 4 byte character and have garbage.
What it user inputs in your text field (or a command line parameter or 
anywhere else) a string containing 4 byte character and you split that 
string on that character? (For example when showing some kind of summary 
of his input.) Don't forget that user can input characters by 
copy-pasting them from the web, not only using his keyboard!

So, if you want to write PROFESSIONAL software with any user input - you 
must handle 4 byte characters at every place you get user input. 
Otherwise you leave a chance to get and show to the user garbage. Is 
this really easier than using UTF8 everywhere?

My personal experience: I am maintaining (as a hobby project) 
multi-language dictionary program (a screen-shoot: 
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3-IaodGIbVQ/TMHY-l9M4sI/AAAAAAAAAak/AbtShWq0ZUQ/s1600/KZod_screen_win7.png 
) and it involves quite a bit of [multilingual] string manipulation and 
when I did migration from delphi to Lazarus I didn't know about 
requirement that all (GUI) strings must be UTF8 and I had no problems 
migrating! Yes, afterwards I tweaked some calls to RTL (mostly file 
handling) functions that expected to get ANSI encoding, but this is not 
a problem of UTF8, but or RTL being (mostly) ansi.


Regards,
Žilvinas Ledas