[Lazarus] non Unicodode application

[Michael Schnell]

Hi Experts,

A friend of mine wants to port an application from Delphi 7 to a be a 
Lazarus 64 Bit Windows application.

This (huge) application only features a very limited GIU, but uses 
strings lot for "uncoded" characters, going in and out via TCP/IP. Any 
automatic type conversion would kill the application.

So it would be necessary that fpc is configured to use the (old) 8 bit 
Strings. These might be used with UTF8 encoding for the GUI stuff (and 
for some limited locations in the business-code with *explicit* 
conversion).

Is this possible with the current version of Lazarus  ?

As I lost the clue on the planned path regarding code-aware strings: 
will this be possible with future versions of Lazarus ,as well ?

Thanks,
-Michael