[Lazarus] Delphi post-XE3 roadmap

[Michael Schnell]

To me all this seems like a great idea and I am enlightened to see that 
you already invested some work on that behalf.

Re-thinking the concept of (Unicode enabled) Strings in that light would 
allow for another idea of mine, I expressed some months ago. I think the 
different strings types should be a hierarchy of increasingly 
specialized classes.

On top, there is a very universal string that allows for true dynamical 
character encoding (code and size).

Derived from same specialized types are provided (and can be created by 
the user) that e.g. define a fixed coding.

By that the details of the different string types and the 
auto-conversion is strictly implementation dependent (and even can be 
changed by the user if he feels like re-doing the appropriate classes) 
and (if correctly done) independent from the visible behavior.

Compiler magic would allow for the syntax known from Delphi and 
(additionally) would allow for creating functions that use the top-level 
(fully dynamical encoded) string class and would do conversions only if 
necessary. Under the hood the compiler does normal calls to (overloaded) 
class functions.

-Michael