[Lazarus] Making sources compatible with Delphi (but Lazarus is priority)

[Juha Manninen]

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 2:43 PM, Mattias Gaertner via Lazarus
<lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
> First it did not compile in Delphi, because of an unsupported inline. I
> fix that with an IFDEF FPC.

Right, I had added that after testing with Delphi.
The inline looks good to me, don't know why Delphi does not like it.

> Then it runs. The output is somewhat hard to interpret as the
> Windows console shows many chars as '?' and the writelns do not
> explain what it is supposed to show.
> The good news is that it works.

Yes, I guess it should be a GUI app. The console is the only place in
Windows not supporting Unicode still. Damn MS, they have supported
Unicode in other APIs and apps for nearly 20 years already.

> The bad news is, that it only works because Delphi silently altered
> the source file and added the BOM.
> Back in Lazarus compiling such a file gives the error:
> LazUnicodeTest.lpr(28,10) Error: UTF-8 code greater than 65535 found

Äh, I did not test moving it back to Lazarus.
Hmmm... why does FPC not understand the BOM?

> You are right, that using Unicode with Lazarus only needs a couple of
> rules to follow. Sharing code with Delphi adds a few more rules.

One valid choice is to edit in Lazarus and copy to Delphi only to be
built. I understood Marcos Douglas planned something like that.
If code really must be edited in both, how to solve it? This was
another complication I did not think about. :(

About the couple of rules to follow, I had these in mind:
 1. Normally use type "String".
 2. Assign a constant always to a type String variable.
 3. Use type UnicodeString explicitly for API calls that need it.

They are not listed as a short list in wiki. The wiki page is more detailed.
Maybe they should be listed as a "Getting started" paragraph.

Juha