Re: System.WCh_Cnv

places where that might be needed, like text rendering, don't work on per
code point basis anyway....

Exactly. And that is wrong, and I want to fix it.

So I'm quite happy with UTF-8 and plain strings.

I am more or less happy with this too [1], but I think we can do better. With UTF-8 in strings the two abstractions (codepoints, encodings) are too entangled for my taste. In rigour you cannot use the standard string operations. I mean you can but must fiddle with the encodings i.e. you are not searching for a codepoint but for a particular encoding. Instead I want to be able to write things like

for I in Str'Range loop
if Str (I) = Euro_Sign then ...
end loop;

I cannot do that with UTF-8 in strings. Note that Wide_Wide_String is of little help here, because of the endianess issue. But it might be a good idea to base Unico on Wide_Wide_String for closeness to the standard.

[1] What makes me happy about UTF-8 is that it seems to have become a de facto default, common denominator encoding.

.

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