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

[Shawn Hargreaves <shargreaves@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Martijn Versteegh writes:
> I'm not so sure about this. IMHO 32-bit unicode is The Right Thing, 
> but I can see the advantage of UTF-8 (backwards comnpatible with 
> 7-bit ascii).

The problem with pure 32 bit text is that pretty much nothing speaks 
it natively, so that would require conversions for every single
communication with the outside world.

> I thought the code was already there, or is it such a mess, 
> does it need so much work?

The Unicode-specific parts are there, but it has turned out to be
much harder than expected to make other parts of the lib work
reliably with them. Everything that deals in strings has needed
work to fix buffer overflows, etc, and even though Allegro itself
is probably now totally Unicode-safe, I'm willing to bet that
a majority of addons will fall over if you try to use them with 
anything but the standard text formats (and it seems unreasonable
(and unlikely) to expect every addon author to fully understand
all the ramifications of unusual text formats).

> 16-bit unicode has a bit of a '640k is enough for everybody' 
> smell to it ;-)

Yeah. I don't think the Unicode people expected anywhere near how
many unusual character sets they would be asked to include!


-- 
Shawn