Hi, I really think the FPC team should make it blatantly clear that the usage of the aliased "String" type should not be used any more with FPC 3.x. It turn I think major alarm bells should start ringing when AnsiString type is used too.
Both are fraught with dangers of loosing data. I've long given up with the UTF-16 vs UTF-8 debate. FPC has now made an even bigger mess than Delphi 2009 did. I've now reached the point where I think - just switch the RTL to UTF-16 only so we can stop loosing data during string conversions! Java does it, C# does it, Delphi 2009 does it. It's time FPC stops trying to please everybody, and switch too. My reasoning for the above. Data loss during string conversions! 1. The "String" type has too many meanings. I recommend you simply stop using it in your code. Instead, use the exact type you really mean or support in your application. 2. AnsiString in FPC 3.x is now code page enabled, and can have many different meanings. There is no guarantee that assigning a UTF8String or UnicodeString to a AnsiString is safe. On some systems the AnsiString might default to a UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding which is fine, but importantly, on other systems in might default to something else, and then you simply loose data during the conversion. What makes it even worse, is that the default encoding for AnsiString is determined at runtime, so the programmer is completely helpless in preventing this. This issue is also not specific to only certain operating systems. You can have a Linux or FreeBSD system that defaults to a non-Unicode type code page, yet the Linux system running right next to that one could have been set up to use a UTF-8 code page. Same for Windows platforms. FPC should seriously start ringing those alarm bells, as many programs compiled with FPC 3.x are bound to hit these errors (BUGS). Valuable data could get corrupted. To all programmers, start using UnicodeString or UTF8String types only, and everywhere! Regards, Graeme Regards, Graeme -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ My public PGP key: http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
