IMHO, this is working fine.
(Thanks for pointing out that there in fact _are_ (slow) function that can manually called to do this with UTF8Strings.)
I don't doubt that it is working fine, but the usual Pascal programmer does not "expect" that (s)he manually needs to call a special function to extract a character from a string ( (s)he is used to just do s[i]) and that (s)he needs to do something other than just "length()" to find out the count of characters in a string. (S)He "expects" that the compiler can handle this as it does have the type UTF8String that tells it about the coding of the information. The compiler instead just ignores this information. (Other than C, Pascal is more largely supposed to use the operant type for defining the kind of an operation. E.g. in C you do "&" for "bitwise and", and "&&" for "boolean and", while with Pascal you always do "and", while the type (integer vs boolean) decides what kind of operation is to be done. Similarly, you do "+" for integer and for String with completely different operations. That is why I think you are allowed to suppose that the compiler knows how to differently handle ANIString and UTF8String. )
I am aware that there _are_ (speed-) reasons that suggest not to ´work with character-counted (instead of subcode-counted) unicode strings. But I would rather work with UCS2 codes WideStrings (trading memory for speed) in that case.
-Michael _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - [email protected] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
