Re: [boost] [General] Always treat std::strings as UTF-8

Subject: Re: [boost] [General] Always treat std::strings as UTF-8
From: Dave Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-18 13:40:27

At Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:27:08 +0100,
Matus Chochlik wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 6:46 PM, Peter Dimov <pdimov_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > Dave Abrahams wrote:
> >>
> >> At Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:27:29 +0200,
> >> Peter Dimov wrote:
> >>
> >> But they won't be. Â That's not today's reality.
> >
> > They should be, though. As a practical matter, the difference between
> > taking/returning a string and taking/returning an utf8_t is to force people
> > to write an explicit conversion. This penalizes people who are already in
> > UTF-8 land because it forces them to use utf8_t( s, encoding_utf8 ) and
> > s.c_str( encoding_utf8 ) everywhere, without any gain or need. It's true
> > that for people whose strings are not UTF-8, forcing those explicit
> > conversions may be considered a good thing. So it depends on what your goals
> > are. Do you want to promote the use of UTF-8 for all strings, or do you want
> > to enable people to remain in non-UTF-8-land?
> >
> +1
> 
> Boost, as the cutting edge C++ library should try to enforce new standards
> and not dwell on old and obsolete ones. Today everybody is (maybe slowly)
> moving towards UTF-8 and creating a new string class/wrapper for UTF-8 that
> nobody uses, IMO, encourages the usage of the old ANSI encodings.
> 
> Maybe a better course of action would be to create ansi_str_t with the encoding
> tags for the legacy ANSI-encoded strings, which could be obsoleted
> in the future, and use std::string as the default class for UTF-8 strings.
> We will have to do this transition anyway at one point, so why not do it now.

Now that's an interesting thought!

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com