> At first i was against UTF8 but now i understand it's power, UTF8 is
> small since most text is in ASCII 7bit there is no increase there,
> that's why the web uses UTF8, and it's also best for storage,
> Microsoft chose UTF16 actually UCS2 because they thought UCS2 will be
> enough for all characters in all languages, time proved them wrong and
> UTF16 is NOT 2 byte encoded but 2 or 4 bytes depending on the
> situation, it helps most people but not everyone and it add an extra
> empty byte for ASCII text, Delphi seems to have some issues with UTF16
> WideStrings i read about it somewhere on the web and there is also a
> BIG BIG performance decrease using WideStrings in Delphi so Lazarus
> played it smart with UTF8 keeping ASCII/ANSI compatibility to some
> level and being fast at the same time, even with the implicit
> conversion it is still faster than WideString operations, UTF8 might
> look ugly but it is very efficient.
UTF8 might be good in the case of international texts mostly English. You say
that pascal program
is such a text, and I would agree with you. But we are living in a real world,
with a tons of text
files. Russian files in Russia will not mostly be converted to UTF8 because of
twice size grouth and... Inconvenience. Old programs... They are in ANSI. It is
possible to convert all them to UTF8, but why?
Look at Windows which introduced unicode: the first step in it was backward
compartibility. We don't notice any unicode in it (until we want to notice).
Look at Kylix (oe) or Delphi 7 (personal): it uses unicode too, but only in
dfm/xfm (and, of course, internal support). And lazarus team is trying to force
UTF8 introduction with a revolution without supporting neither old project nor
saving files (and only saving) in compartible with other projects format.
Besides, that revolutionary process begins when the other version of the same
product doesn't support such utf8. OK, I'll try to do something...
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