MacToISO is still confusing me

[Fraser Gordon]

On 23/12/2013 00:55, Peter W A Wood wrote:
> Will the Unicode support cope with OS X encoding being UTF-16 for Cocoa (LiveCode Desktop) and UTf-8 for Darwin (LiveCode Server)?

As implemented, things get re-encoded (if required) at the boundary when
calls are made to the OS. Currently, UTF-16 is being used for strings
that can't be represented in the native 8-bit encoding so, for Cocoa and
Win32, this is passed straight to the OS while on Linux it gets
converted to the system's default encoding (UTF-8 on most recent Linux
distros but it could be something else). Darwin will be the same (except
fixed as UTF-8).

All of this should be invisible to scripts, of course. Ideally, the use
of Unicode should be entirely transparent - something that works on the
native 8-bit encoding should also work identically on Unicode.
Similarly, the choice of encoding at the OS level should not make any
visible differences. (As an example, "char x to y of" doesn't depend on
the encoding; whole characters are always selected, even if they are
encoded as multiple bytes or 16-bit words).