On 5 May 2005 at 10:14, Dmitry Yemanov wrote:

>> For conversion from utf-8 to application charset and back
>> system routines can be used. Such as WideCharToMultiByte on Windows
>> or iconv library on POSIX.
>
>Well, this makes some sense then. But doesn't it mean that users loose
>any ability to work with charsets explicitly?

No. We just have to map FB charsets to OS charsets. Mentioned
routine can convert any charset to unicode. At least MSDN says:
"Specifies the code page used to perform the conversion. This
parameter can be given the value of any code page that is installed
or available in the system."
If code page is not available in OS, user application can work with
it, of course, but... without user interface. If you ever installed
american version of Windows, you know what I'm talking about.
--
SY, Dimitry Sibiryakov.