[Lazarus] OT: Re: Lazarus (UTF8) and Windows: SysToUTF8, UTF8ToSys... Is there a better solution?

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Reinier Olislagers wrote:

>> Why these questions bother you?
> This question as such does not bother me.
> 
> The endless repetitive discussions about U[1] with armchair theorists
> repeating the same arguments they used the previous discussion does.
> 
> Currently, people are working on getting U[1] support into FPC. I'd
> suggest helping them instead of blowing hot air in discussions.
> Even if you're one of those theorists that disapprove of whatever
> choices are made currently, the sooner it is clear that those choices
> will or will not work in practice, the better: if it turns out to be
> unworkable, an alternative solution can be tried.
> Just talking about it endlessly does not help.
> 
> [1] Unicode, the standard, or any implementation of it, not necessarily
> the Delphi UTF16 flavour.

I don't like getting involved in this since I'm a minimal user of 
Unicode and even then I find it most convenient to explicitly translate 
to a uniform 16-bit internal representation.

So speaking as an armchair theorist and addressing the others, I suggest 
that looking at what the Perl6 implementors are trying to do might be 
worthwhile. One particular reason for this is that they're trying to get 
to grips with issues like how to categorise characters that (usually) 
appear in fixed combinations, for example the various styles of brackets.

Now obviously this is extremely remote, but at some point the compiler 
might have an interest in parsing non-ASCII text. Rather more pressing 
is making sure that highlighters etc. don't throw a fit as soon as they 
encounter something unexpected.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]