Why not? Course, it is supported. But... At first, double size increasing makes
it sensitive (especially in mob.phones). But it is the least problem.
Traditionally one symbol is considered as 1 byte (it is more than enough for
latin and cyrillic), it makes many incompartibilities with a good old tested
software (esp. on Windows). Then, looking at a UTF file with even DOS editor
(dos has different encoding, it is a problem, but it is solved) will result in
nonsense. Then, looking through executable (may be spoiled, may be very old)
for a Russian text (or may be just patching .mo file directly) for localized
text in UTF8 is... Say it, difficult.
And now disadvantages of UTF-8 text files.
1. 1-byte text is stable for both byte errors and byte losses (just spoiled
byte will be a spoiled char). Unicode (2 or 4 byte) is stable for byte
spoilage. Large part of UTF-8 file can be spoiled both with byte loss and byte
spoilage. Besides, spoiled file (or partially text-partially-binary files) can
break working with some soft (like iconv).
2. Why should we lose space twice because of UTF-8? It is even more
inconvenient for Russians than using 2-byte unicode for Americans (and, at
last, analysing UTF-8 by hand is more difficult than doing such with koi8-r,
cp1251 or cp866).
And, anyway, neither delphi nor kylix uses UTF8 (kylix uses unicode in forms).
This can make problems with porting.
So, the most reasonable thing is to give a choice for user, what encoding to
use. The easiest way is to save all .pas files from SynEdit in system encoding,
and to translate it to UTF-8 while loading. More complex ideas will include
encoding name in project or even file (may be if the first line is
{&enc=cp1251} the file should be translated from that encoding to utf8 while
loading).
At last, the fact that Lazarus compiled for windows, uses ansi (cp1251) while
lazarus for linux uses UTF-8 is completely inacceptible.
So, I think, it
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