Re: Why use UNICODE?

From:
"Igor Tandetnik" <itandetnik@mvps.org>
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.vc.language
Date:
Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:51:11 -0400
Message-ID:
<O9SNGBzMJHA.2348@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl>
<swtbase@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:97465738-8ce4-489c-b31c-01c54eb69d96@u75g2000hsf.googlegroups.com

According to popular usage, I have been surrounding all my text in my
source code with TEXT(" ") (with UNICODE defined). I am using a
standard installation of XP with English as the default language.

I want to know what advantage do I have in my program with the above
being done when I output all error messages to users in English? How
will my program behave in, say a Chinese language computer? My program
takes no text input from the user, should I still use UNICODE?


One day your program will become popular (or so, I assume, you hope),
and you would want to expand your market share. You might be surprised,
but among one billion plus Chinese-speaking people there are many who
don't speak English. If you want to sell to them, your program would
have to be localized and display its messages in Chinese. This is fairly
trivial if your program is built with Unicode, and fairly difficult if
built with ANSI. Considering that it costs you virtually nothing to
support Unicode, the choice becomes pretty obvious.
--
With best wishes,
    Igor Tandetnik

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