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From: Marius Amado-Alves <marius@amado-alves.info>
Subject: Re: System.WCh_Cnv
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 14:03:21 +0100
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Date: 2006-07-25T15:05:13+02:00

> places where that might be needed, like text rendering, don't work  
> on per
> code point basis anyway....

Exactly. And that is wrong, and I want to fix it.

> So I'm quite happy with UTF-8 and plain strings.

I am more or less happy with this too [1], but I think we can do  
better. With UTF-8 in strings the two abstractions (codepoints,  
encodings) are too entangled for my taste. In rigour you cannot use  
the standard string operations. I mean you can but must fiddle with  
the encodings i.e. you are not searching for a codepoint but for a  
particular encoding. Instead I want to be able to write things like

for I in Str'Range loop
    if Str (I) = Euro_Sign then ...
end loop;

I cannot do that with UTF-8 in strings. Note that Wide_Wide_String is  
of little help here, because of the endianess issue. But it might be  
a good idea to base Unico on Wide_Wide_String for closeness to the  
standard.

[1] What makes me happy about UTF-8 is that it seems to have become a  
de facto default, common denominator encoding.