On 09/06/2013 03:59 PM, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
You defer the problem from the interface to the implementation. When a
procedure has an string parameter of an unknown encoding, the
implementation must check every time the *current* encoding of the
parameter, and proceed as appropriate.
IMHO you are partly right. If a function needs to know the encoding of a
string it handles, it of course needs to initiate a conversion or some
ether encoding-specific action. With the appropriate compiler magic for
this (not Delphi predefined) type conversion would happen automatically
as soon as the user decides to assign the input string to a variable
with any predefined fixed string encoding he chooses. In this case the
overhead would be close to none regarding a conversion when calling the
function.
But there are many cases where the called function does not need to know
(and IMHO should not know) the encoding type of the string(s) it works on:
A1) A function that just calls some other function with the string it
got as an argument. (Silly example: a function that sticks three things
together to one.) (Supposedly some library functions like "copy()" might
have build-in compiler magic to avoid conversion when used with - say -
UTF8, anyway.)
A2) A function that does not interpret the content of a string but
simply stores the String. Most prominent example being TStrings (and
here TStringList as it's child). To store the string it does not need to
know the encoding of the string but just it's byte-count, that is easy
enough to be calculated
Or
B1) A (specially designed) function that is able to work on multiple
encoding types without the necessity to completely convert the string
into some predefined encoding.
An example would be a function that counts the printable characters (or
more simple to do counts the number of digits) contained in a string.
I.e. *all* possible encodings must be handled (implemented) inside the
procedure, what's almost impossible.
Not true at all (see above). This seems to be _the_ misconception with
this issue. Especially TStrings/TStringList and friends would suffer
severely when implemented in a Delphi-isch (thus Windowish) way with
fixed predefined encoding for the user code interface.
Regarding the said (specially designed) function the implementing user
of course needs to know which encoding he needs to support and thus to
take care of when implementing.
-Michael
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