At Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:27:08 +0100, Matus Chochlik wrote:
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 6:46 PM, Peter Dimov <pdimov@pdimov.com> wrote:
Dave Abrahams wrote:
At Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:27:29 +0200, Peter Dimov wrote:
But they won't be. That's not today's reality.
They should be, though. As a practical matter, the difference between taking/returning a string and taking/returning an utf8_t is to force people to write an explicit conversion. This penalizes people who are already in UTF-8 land because it forces them to use utf8_t( s, encoding_utf8 ) and s.c_str( encoding_utf8 ) everywhere, without any gain or need. It's true that for people whose strings are not UTF-8, forcing those explicit conversions may be considered a good thing. So it depends on what your goals are. Do you want to promote the use of UTF-8 for all strings, or do you want to enable people to remain in non-UTF-8-land?
+1
Boost, as the cutting edge C++ library should try to enforce new standards and not dwell on old and obsolete ones. Today everybody is (maybe slowly) moving towards UTF-8 and creating a new string class/wrapper for UTF-8 that nobody uses, IMO, encourages the usage of the old ANSI encodings.
Maybe a better course of action would be to create ansi_str_t with the encoding tags for the legacy ANSI-encoded strings, which could be obsoleted in the future, and use std::string as the default class for UTF-8 strings. We will have to do this transition anyway at one point, so why not do it now.
Now that's an interesting thought! -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com