Yoshiki,

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Ah, this is... I don't know what to say...
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You said it well.



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Second, let's clarify that the external representation and the internal representation are different beast. My stuff mainly uses the UTF-8 for the external representation. As long as your code is mainly
written in pure ASCII plus a few other characters such as up arrow and left arrow, the difference in size is just ignorable.
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It seems wise to sit back and let you solve the back arrow problem.



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For the internal representation, my stuff use 8-bit per character representation for a String that solely contains latin1 characters.  For those Strings that contains non-latin1 chars, it actually uses 32-bit representation. It is similar to the SmallInteger and
LargeInteger implicit conversion and the user shouldn't have to care about the difference. The typical memory footprint surely will go up a bit, but as you can imagine, not much.
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That sounds great.  Thanks for the explanation.

Bill



Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bills at anest4.anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029