REPLY: 2:280/5555 65e57e37   
   MSGID: 1:104/117 65e5e2a4   
   CHRS: US-ASCII 2   
   TZUTC: -0700   
   TID: hpt/lnx 1.9 2022-07-03   
   Hello Michiel.   
      
   04 Mar 24 08:42, 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.   
    VA>> Especially with keeping code backward compatible with systems,   
    VA>> which may not have Unicode support. I keep thinking about it and   
    VA>> looking for possible ways to implement.   
      
    MvdV> Backwards compatibility is nice but there always comes a point that it   
    MvdV> gets in the way of progress and it has to be dropped. Are you thinking   
    MvdV> about the DOS version? If so I say, forget about it. Freeze the DOS   
    MvdV> version, the small minority that still uses DOS will have to make do   
    MvdV> with what they have fo the rest of the life of DOS.   
      
   We've been thinking about that option.   
      
    MvdV> Another way may be to not use UTF-8 internally but use two byte   
    MvdV> widechrs everywhere and simple store the raw unicode code point.   
    MvdV> Conversion to and from code point to UTF-8 is simple. That will limit   
    MvdV> the use to the first 65535 code points, but that might be enough for   
    MvdV> the remaining life of Fidonet. OTOH, that is almost the same as what   
    MvdV> Window XP did. It used UTF-16 internally and Microsoft now regrets   
    MvdV> that.   
      
   Best possible way is to use UTF-8 for all strings inside and only convert text   
   when read/write from/to message base and to screen. And even if drop DOS   
   support - need to take into account OS specifics for Unicode. As long as   
   GoldEd uses fixed size buffers in many places - that's huge refactoring.   
   Better to replace it with std::string almost everywhere.   
      
    VA>> For example function, which splits message to lines is almost   
    VA>> 1000 lines long! It has variables, used in multiple places, it   
    VA>> not only splits the message, but guess charset, do recoding and   
    VA>> other fun stuff.   
      
    MvdV> Wauw!   
      
   That's one of the reasons, why progress is slow.   
      
   Vitaliy   
      
   --- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20240223   
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