I still see advice about using the LPTSTR/TCHAR types, etc., instead of LPWSTR/WCHAR. I believe the Unicode stuff was well introduced at Win2k, and I frankly don't write code for Windows 98 anymore. (Excepting special cases, of course.) Given that I don't care about Windows 98 (or, even less, ME) as they're decade old OS, is there any reason to use the compatibility TCHAR, etc. types? Why still advise people to use TCHAR - what benefit does it add over using WCHAR directly?
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A:
If someone tells you to walk up to 1,000,000 lines of non-_UNICODE C++, with plenty of declarations using char instead of wchar_t or TCHAR or WCHAR, you had better be prepared to cope with the non-Unicode Win32 API. Conversion on a large scale is quite costly, and may not be something the source-o-money is prepared to pay for.
As for new code, well, there's so much example code out there using TCHAR that it may be easier to cut and paste, and there is in some cases some friction between WCHAR as wchar_t and WCHAR as unsigned short.
Who knows, maybe some day MS will add a UTF-32 data type under TCHAR?
bmargulies
2010-06-03 00:59:23
Interesting point about the possibility of expanding TCHAR. Unlikely though as UTF-32 is likely to take significantly more space on pretty much every piece of actual text in existence. HTML5 rejects it as an encoding entirely.
kibibu
2010-06-03 01:09:36
@kib the UTF-32 comment was intended to be humorous.
bmargulies
2010-06-03 01:10:05
@bmargulies Oops :/
kibibu
2010-06-03 01:35:52
@kibibu: afaik it already happened on some platforms. Last time I checked wchar_t was 4 bytes on g++/linux.
SigTerm
2010-06-03 02:11:33
I suppose the question was primarily aimed at new code: If you're using the *A stuff, you're missing out on Unicode entirely anyways. And if you're using char instead of TCHAR or WCHAR, then again, you've got bigger problems.
Thanatos
2010-06-03 03:14:08
@Than I have nothing to say about new 'A' code.
bmargulies
2010-06-03 10:31:22
A:
Actually, the unicode versions of functions were introduced with Win32 in 1993 with Windows NT 3.1. In fact, on the NT based oses, almost all the *A functions just convert to Unicode and call the *W version internally. Also, support for the *W functions on 9x does exist through Microsoft Layer for Unicode.
For new programs, I would definately recommend using the TCHAR macros or WCHARs directly. I doubt MS will be adding support for any other character sizes during NT's lifetime. For existing code bases, I guess it would depend on how important it is to support Unicode vs cost of fixing it. The *A functions need to stay in Win32 forever for backward compatibility.
Chris Smith
2010-06-08 13:38:21