Re: Are _T() and TEXT() macros equivalent?

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David Ching wrote:

Deplorable = the user was too lazy to type in the _T() around the string :o)


Absolutely amazing to me that some of the most practical and useful things are considered deplorable by others.

Joking apart, I would say that the vast majority of the uses of the automatic conversion from narrow to wide string are with hard coded strings where the programmer simply forgot to use _T("").

True story: In my copy of VC6, I modified the CString headers to remove the conversion constructors and assignments. This allowed me to catch many errors in my hybrid UTF8/UTF16 application. Some time later, I tried to make a Unicode build of Ultimate ToolBox and Ultimate Grid. Dozens of errors, all but one of which involved failure to use _T(""). The _T("") idiom was used correctly in other places.

Is this automatic conversion useful? I really don't think so. It just leads to a situation where it is possible to omit _T() (or L) in some places but not others. Soon the ANSI code page will be gone, and hybrid UTF16/UTF8 applications may become more common, and the automatic conversion will do the wrong thing (AFAIK, it is not possible to set the code page to be UTF8).

--
David Wilkinson
Visual C++ MVP
.

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