On 14/08/17 17:47, Sven Barth via Lazarus wrote:
The main problem of such a dynamic type would be the inability to do fast indexing as the compiler would need to insert runtime checks for the size of a character. I had already thought the same, but then had to discard the idea due to this.
Is this really a big problem? It is not as if it would be necessary to do a table lookup everytime you index a string as the indexing method could be an attribute of the string and updated with the character encoding attribute. Is it really that complicated for the compiler to generate code that jumps to an indexing method depending upon a data attribute?
Is your problem really more about the result type as, depending on the character width, the result could be an AnsiChar or WideChar or a UTF8 character for which I don't believe there is a defined char type (other than an arguable mis-use of UCS4Char)?
I can accept that a clear up of this area would also have to extend to the char types as well - but I would also argue that that is well overdue. On a quick count, I found 7 different char types in the system unit.
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