Subj : Need volonteers to test another patch
To   : Vitaliy Aksyonov
From : Michiel van der Vlist
Date : Mon Mar 04 2024 08:42 am

Hello Vitaliy,

On Sunday March 03 2024 16:31, you wrote to me:

 MvdV>> Perhaps the best strategy is to have Golded alway use UTF-8
 MvdV>> internally. Almost everyone else does these days...

 VA> That would be perfect. It only takes huge amount of effort. Especially
 VA> with keeping code backward compatible with systems, which may not have
 VA> Unicode support. I keep thinking about it and looking for possible
 VA> ways to implement.

Backwards compatibility is nice but there always comes a point that it gets in 
the way of progress and it has to be dropped. Are you thinking about the DOS 
version? If so I say, forget about it. Freeze the DOS version, the small 
minority that still uses DOS will have to make do with what they have fo the 
rest of the life of DOS.

Another way may be to not use UTF-8 internally but use two byte widechrs 
everywhere and simple store the raw unicode code point. Conversion to and from 
code point to UTF-8 is simple. That will limit the use to the first 65535 code 
points, but that might be enough for the remaining life of Fidonet. OTOH, that 
is almost the same as what Window XP did. It used UTF-16 internally and 
Microsoft now regrets that.

 VA> For example function, which splits message to lines is almost 1000
 VA> lines long! It has variables, used in multiple places, it not only
 VA> splits the message, but guess charset, do recoding and other fun
 VA> stuff.

Wauw!


Cheers, Michiel

--- GoldED+/W32-MSVC 1.1.5-b20170303
 * Origin: Nieuw Schnøørd (2:280/5555)

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