[DUG] Unicode [redux]

[Jeremy North]

Under what circumstances would you want to use the $H- option now? For
recompiling old code? Perhaps it should now be deprecated as well.
Time to update that really old code or just leave it in an older
version. I personally have a number of projects that I won't upgrade
for various reasons.

I find it frustrating how sometimes Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero seem
to always favour backward compatiblity at the expense of doing things
better or right. However there is really only one group to blame for
that. Users. People complain when they have to change a line of code
when using a new version. They expect all these new things to be
added, and expect not to have to change anything. This is what leads
to compromises. The 64bit version will be interesting...

When unicode was introduced, it was going to cause some upgrading
issues, so they (Embarcadero) should have broken it properly, instead
of leaving a lot of legacy smells around. It is a balancing act and
you'll never please everyone.

I'd certainly settle for Embarcadero giving Delphi 2007 to upgraders
of Delphi 2010. Anything that gets people off the pre-Galileo IDEs is
a blessing. Although it is pretty easy to give product away when it
isn't yours to give in the first place though.

A "clean-up" release would be nice but might be a while off and folks
don't generally like those because they don't bring new features. A
bit like the Delphi 2007 release. I hated that because of the
non-breaking nature of the release, but many other developers thought
it was really good because upgrading was really easy (from 2006).

Anyway, I've gone off on a little tangent there...