[Lazarus] Delphi post-XE3 roadmap

[Michael Schnell]

On 08/29/2012 12:51 PM, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> I think we only need one "unicode string" type and be done with it. 
> That "unicode string" type can support the official UTF-8, UTF-16 and 
> UTF-32 encodings. That's it! No more other string types should be 
> needed for modern applications.
>

I think very different.

We do need different string types, anyway, to be Delphi compatible. In 
fact for the Delphi compiler the syntax for defining a string variable 
does implement multiple different types that all are called String in 
the source code. This is necessary to avoid the overhead fully dynamical 
behavior of all strings would introduce, thus the compiler already knows 
about the string type (aka predefined encoding) when it compiles a line 
of source code. This is agreed to be a good thing regarding only 
providing fully dynamical encoding.

FPC programs need to be able to read text files encoded in many 
different encoding types. this includes the different string encoding 
types provided by Delphi but should be extensible and supposedly support 
for e.g. the funny html character encoding (I don't remember the name) 
should be added right away.

Support for fully dynamically encoded strings should be available to 
allow for doing functions that correctly deal with whatever encoding 
without necessarily doing any conversion.

For me this asks for a decent hierarchy of string types and their 
corresponding classes.

-Michael