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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>All,<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>After using FFI for a short time now I would say that it is
a very important part of the development platform. There is a lot of
power to being able to communicate to external systems. Consider talking
to databases, report writers, OS api’s …<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Given that this is an important part of our platform, I
think that the lack of wide character support is a real problem for squeak. Without
wide character support we loose the capabilities to communicate with systems
that use languages that are not supported by Ascii. I personally saw this
problem in the Microsoft API where there is a lot of support for wide
characters. It appears that my problem is solvable by not supporting non Ascii
string names however since we have recently started supporting wide characters
I’m asking the community to support wide characters in FFI.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>I do not feel that I have the expertise or the understanding
currently to make this change so if anyone has the skills and time to make the
change could you please consider it. Send patches to Andreas(<a
href="mailto:andreas.raab@gmx.de">andreas.raab@gmx.de</a>). <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Thank you for your time and consideration,<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Ron Teitelbaum<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Mantis Bug # 4379 <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><a href="http://bugs.impara.de/view.php?id=4379">http://bugs.impara.de/view.php?id=4379</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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