Re: [boost] [general] What will string handling in C++ look like in the future [was Always treat ... ]

Subject: Re: [boost] [general] What will string handling in C++ look like in the future [was Always treat ... ]
From: Alexander Lamaison (awl03_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-19 10:25:23

On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:06:52 -0500, Ian Emmons wrote:

> On Jan 19, 2011, at 7:16 AM, Alexander Lamaison wrote:
>> On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:33:02 +0100, Matus Chochlik wrote:
>>> The string-encoding-related discussion boils down
>>> for me to the following: What fill the string handling
>>> in C++ look like in the (maybe not immediate) future.
>>> 
>>> *Scenario A:*
>>> 
>> [..]
>>> All the wstrings, wxString, Qstrings, utf8strings, etc. will
>>> be abandoned. All the APIs using ANSI or UCS-2 will
>>> be slowly phased out with the help of convenience
>>> classes like ansi_str_t and ucs2_t that will be made
>>> obsolete and finally dropped (after the transition).
>> 
>> This is simply not going to happen.  How could MS even go about doing this
>> in Windows?  It would make very single piece of Windows software
>> incompatible with the next version!
> 
> There is a straightforward way for Microsoft to migrate Windows to this
> future:  If they add UTF-8 support to their narrow character interface
> (I am avoiding calling it ANSI due to the negative connotations that
> has) and add narrow character APIs for all wide character APIs that lack
> a narrow counterpart, then I believe we could treat POSIX and Windows
> identically from an encoding point of view.

It would break any programs using the narrow API currently that use any
'exotic' codepage (i.e. pretty much anything except 7-bit ascii).  That
said, perhaps it's worth it.

Alex

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