@Amigo1
It's a bit off topic, so I start a new thread.
Quote:
Would Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16) improve the situation?
Yes because:
* People like me want need to reinvent the wheel, to do some thing that takes 2 sec to do in .net, on windows.
UTF8 vs ASCII,
* display text string of any language correct even if your from a different nationality and use different language.
* Preserve the correct Symbols.
* Possibly improve support of Asian languages and Klingon.
Quote:
Can someone explain in layman terms if and why it would be difficult to make the whole OS use Unicode?
I think that's going to take a lot of time and beta testing to make the whole OS, UTF8 friendly. Besides the lack of any improvement on supporting UTF8 in the OS sens 2004, I do not have high hopes.
Well there are some parts of the OS that has support for it, I believe Reaction, but that high level GUI toolkit, the low level stuff that is missing.
In UTF8 you need to decode and encode the string, etch symbol in the string has variable length it can take one or more bytes. This effects the way you change a string, find the length, convert upper and lowercase and so on.
To display a UTF8 string you can't simply convert it to ASCII, as some data might be lost, because ASCII format can not contain more then one language, while in UTF8 format all symbols have unique values (no language barrier)
First step is to provided a way to encode/decode/read/change symbols.
Then the OS will need a routine to display UTF8 and maybe other encodings.
There are possibly different ways UTF8 can integrated into the OS, for example you might add new method into Graphic.library, or you might extend Struct RastPort whit Encode parameter, extending the RastPort structure might have unknown side affects as application some time Init the structure.
UTF8 can be auto detected, by verifying the total length of symbols in bytes vs the number of bytes in the string, and if symbols where not possible to encode, then string is not valid.( Adding auto detection will slow down displaying text. )
Or you can maybe add some kind of ESC code to force some functions into UTF8 mode.
Then you have the filesystem, Windows, screens, menus, and so that has to have support for UTF8, filesystem is the tricky part, because so many programs interact whit it, there is also the issue of having a shell that you can type the names, when names are not in your language.
REF:
http://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum ... t_id=87926#forumpost87926
Edited by LiveForIt on 2014/3/4 13:01:20
Edited by LiveForIt on 2014/3/4 13:07:43
Edited by LiveForIt on 2014/3/4 14:54:34