On 19/03/12 09:50, Enrico Weigelt wrote: > Hi folks, > > > I just went into this list and wonder why lo has its own string > implementation instead of using std::string. Could anyone > please give me some insight ?
the historical reason is that std::string is part of the C++ standard library, and implementations of that generally only started to become actually usable on all platforms in the early 2000s. the other reason is that std::string isn't particularly well suited to storing Unicode, because all of the operations on it are defined in terms of elements of an array. so when using std::string accessing UTF-8 characters is both cumbersome and error-prone, while using std::wstring is not an option at all because it is based on wchar_t, and the geniuses didn't define whether that is 16bit or 32bit, so it's _completely_ useless in practice. the only option really would be to use something like std;:basic_string<uint32_t>, but that wastes a lot of space in the common case, or std::basic_string<uint16_t>, which is just as stupid as our existing rtl::OUString. hmm... what i'd really like from a string class is that it has no operator[] at all (who needs that anyway), just an iterator interface that returns characters as uint32_t, and another interface to write the string UTF-8 encoded into some buffer, thus allowing for picking whatever internal implementation is most suitable. _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
