Re: [AD] Proposal to kill non-UTF-8 support

["Eric Botcazou" <ebotcazou@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> In games, app<-->OS string interactions would be rarer than
> ASCII-source-code-to-current-encoding string conversions, so
> you just move the cumbersome-ness elsewhere.

Do you mean the benefit of using 16-bit Unicode for Allegro on top of a
16-bit Unicode OS is outweighted by the need to convert little ASCII strings
to 16-bit Unicode throughout the source code ? Yes, probably.

Moreover, given the current trend toward UTF-8 amongst the big Open Source
projects (KDE, the upcoming GTK+ 2/Gnome 2) and the cross-platform nature of
Allegro, I finally think it would make sense (and simplify everything) to
use UTF-8 internally as well as for the API.

And I could always make an add-on on top of the new API to emulate the
behaviour of Allegro 4's set_uformat() ;-)

> ... assuming source code is ASCII/UTF-8, that is.  If not, UTF-8 would
> clearly be a pain to work with too.  I'd be surprised if compilers
> ever stopped supporting ASCII source code though.

I think you don't run a big risk saying that :-)

--
Eric Botcazou
ebotcazou@xxxxxxxxxx