> did you notice
> Office applications also use Unicode for storage and nobody seems to
> complain about it
OK, office applications do so. It was some (or it is better to say - a lot of)
problems
with them, so when MSOffice 97 was introduced, most people had it with an old
office.
And these problems were only with badly saved old files, or files with wrong
fonts.
But that situation was very good because of
1. Backward compatibility.
2. Changing encoding type was concerned only with internal office format.
Office (and other applications to) was able to use either plain text or
unicode, and
unicode is not used at all.
You are trying to break both things: no compatibility and autoconversion is
made for old (or delphi/kylix) projects
and you are forcing saving text (.pas) files in the new encoding. Is it so good?
> needed and it's not so painful done the right way, in our case UTF8 is
> the best way to do it, instead of having 2 sets of components for each
> encoding, Ansi and UTF16 and options to use UTF8 instead of Ansi, it
> is simply easier to just use UTF8 and you can also use some converter
> such as the one included with synapse library if you need support for
> Ansi codepages, unless you will only write russian applications you
> will need more codepages and possibly some Unicode form and why not
I don't speak that utf8 shouldn't be used at all. If I write an international
application, I'll
either write clean ansi7 .pas files with internationalization .po files or I'll
make such an
applications using some koi8 or cp1251 comments (that wouldn't harm) or I'll
make another mechanism
of internationalization. But sometimes I have to make a small Russian program,
may be for student testing
(yes, there is such an application, it is written on Lazarus and is used on our
department of the University), or
to data processing. Of course, the first stage is making Russian application
with russian text in messages and buttons
(you must be sure, both students and post-graduates will be strongly
disappointed if they will see English messages,
and they will be disappointed much more if they would see somewhat like
ЪЪЪЦЪЪЪЪЪЪ). Of course, I should use only Win95 and Win2k on work machines, and
either my licensed Windows Vista Home Basic or Linux (mandriva or SLAMD64) on
my home machine, dependend what have I previously loaded. And even at that time
I have some problems because the encoding of project is different. Why it is
not possible to load a project saved in another encoding? Especially if this is
a system encoding! Especially bad it is for Windows because linux has iconv
utility. So, if I do something on linux, and next time will use windows, I'll
need to reboot back or to write a recoder (which at last I did). And can you
imagine if one file would stay untranslated? OK, you will make UTF8 support on
Windows, but I am not sure that it won't conflict with system encoding. For
example, are you sure that
ShowMessage('Ваша оценка - '+IntToString(mark));
written in UTF8 will really shows correct message?
And the same will be with Application.MessageBox?
If you are, how will it be with those who have a tons of code (easily converted
to UTF8, as you say) full with
Windows.MessageBox(Handle,...)
which means MessageBoxA?
And you say that it is not reasonable to make them a choice, to use or not to
use UTF8 in their programs.
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