Notes on contents of the MAPPING directory:
EASTASIA:
This directory is obsolete.
ETSI:
ETSI GSM 03.38 7-bit default alphabet mapping.
ISO8859:
These are the mapping tables of the ISO 8859 series (1 - 16).
OBSOLETE:
Obsolete and unsupported mapping tables for historical
and archival purposes only.
VENDORS:
Miscellaneous mapping tables for small codesets, typically provided
by vendors. The majority of current, useful tables are here.
While Apple and Microsoft have gone back to edit their symbols, Google continues to use a pistol in Android keyboards and doesn’t appear to have plans to change this. None of the companies in question have adjusted their knife, sword, bomb, poison and coffin emojis, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When vendors start prescribing how emojis must look like (influenced by all sorts of emotions) without the user allowing to choose (via a font – that’s what fonts are for!) how they look then it invalidates the whole Unicode principle:
These emoji aren’t text and should be gone from the Unicode standard before they can do more harm.
Will the next step be that vendors define their own colours for certain characters in fonts? For Windows Times New Roman A becomes red, B green, C yellow, but in Courier New we’ll permute these colours and all Operating Systems and Versions will do different random colour choices.
In a funny way, he explains why the simplest fundamentals of computer software text, dates and numbers can cause some real headache for the programmer…
One of the features that bites me over and over again is the ZEROBASEDSTRINGS that got introduced in Delphi XE3 and is by default ON in mobile compilers and OFF in Desktop compilers.
Back then, Mark Edington showed a small example of the effects:
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The XE3 RTL source code has been refactored to be string index base agnostic. In most cases this is done by utilizing string helper functions which are always zero based.
When it is necessary to traverse a string, the Char[] property is often used to access the individual characters without concern for the current state of the compiler with respect to zero based strings.
In addition, the “Low” and “High” standard functions can now be passed a string variable to provide further flexibility as needed.
When zero based strings are enabled, Low(string) will return 0, otherwise it will return 1. Likewise, High() returns a bounds adjusted length variation.
The problem is the non-existent forward compatibility of the other compilers (Delphi XE2 and lower).
So if you have library code that needs to work in Delphi versions, you cannot use the High and Low to make the code ZEROBASEDSTRINGS neutral.
Many Delphi developers regularly skip many Delphi versions, so these are still popular:
Delphi XE1 and XE2 (the last 2 compilers before Delphi really started to support mobile)
Delphi 2007 (the last non-Unicode Delphi compiler)
Delphi 7 (the last non-Galileo IDE)
The result is that library code is full of conditionan IF/IFDEF blocks like these:
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 