L'équipe PureBasic lance un débat, faut-il supprimer le mode ASCII ? Vous pouvez participer au débat sur le forum officiel de PureBasic, votre avis est important.

Hi there,

Since PB 5.30, the minimum Windows OS to run PureBasic is Windows XP. That means than every OS (Windows XP+, OS X 10.5+, Linux) now supports unicode natively, so we discussed with Timo the opportunity for us to remove ASCII support from PB and provide an unicode only compiler. Still supporting ASCII is a big work for us, as we need to provide duplicate fonctions when dealing with strings, which can leads to more bugs. Also, ASCII is an old tech and is condamned to disappear sooner or later, as unicode can handle it as well.

What would change for you:

- Basically, if your software runs with the "unicode" swith ON, nothing will change, you can skip the following text . If not, then you can enable it and test it.
- All strings in PB will be handled as UCS2 (16-bit) strings internally. So if you used "@String$" somewhere in your code, change are high it won't work anymore (if dealing which an API for example)
- We plan to provide 2 new functions, to ease things a bit:
*AsciiBuffer = ToAscii(String$)
*UTF8Buffer = ToUTF8(String$)

What would change for us:

- Faster building time, less code in our source tree, makefiles much shorter
- Less bugs because of code reduction
- No more unicode switch, so it's easier when sharing code source on the forum, or when developping an user lib (everybody is unicode)
- Makes PB definitely more modern.

We would like to do it for the 5.40 version. What are your thoughts about it ? Is it a deal breaker for you ?

edit: before freaking out, we are just talking about removing the "unicode switch", not all ascii related operations !

The Fantaisie Software Team