[Cuis-dev] UnicodeString coercion

[Juan Vuletich]

Well, that boat sailed a long time ago.

The interoperability between (Byte)String and UnicodeString does exactly 
the same as interoperability between 
SmallInteger/LargeInteger/Fraction/Float. With numbers, this only 
matters when dealing with the external world, where you need to ensure 
you're using the required primitive type, and not what Smalltalk choses 
for you. Same here. #asByteString to the rescue.

See 
https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev/blob/master/Documentation/Papers/2022-11-UnicodeSupportInCuisSmalltalk.pdf

Hope this helps,

On 2026-07-01 11:59 AM, Phil B via Cuis-dev wrote:
> Sorry... forgot to reply all.
>
> To put it more succinctly: rather than assume that anywhere you have a 
> string/stream it's just as good to substitute a Unicode string/stream, 
> it really seems like it should be opt-in via #asUnicodeString or 
> #asUniFileStream for coercion or explicit at instance creation time.  
> That makes the contract clear and you don't get something other than 
> what you want/need.
>
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 11:52 AM Phil B <pbpublist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     I hear what you're saying but that assumption breaks a lot of
>     code.  They are *similar* to String, but they are actually very
>     different creatures and only superficially protocol compatible.
>     (i.e. you often cannot substitute a UnicodeString for a String
>     without severely breaking things... even when 'String' is nowhere
>     in the source code that breaks)  I have had to ugly up a lot of
>     code to get out of the implicit opt-in to Unicode that Cuis has
>     done on this front.[1] Please don't rename String... that would
>     make things 100x worse.
>
>     [1] i.e. 'where the hell did that UnicodeString come from?' when I
>     didn't want it... usually when dealing with a DNU error dialog. 
>     Even when I resolve the DNU, the breakage often continues on down
>     the chain because you can't just substitute UnicodeString for
>     String when you're dealing with FFI, web APIs, file formats etc.
>
>     On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 11:16 AM Juan Vuletich <juan at cuis.st> wrote:
>
>         Hi Phil,
>
>         On 2026-07-01 10:27 AM, Phil B via Cuis-dev wrote:
>         > Is there a reason UnicodeString asString returns self rather
>         than a
>         > String?
>         >
>         Yes. UnicodeStrings are conceptually Strings. Perhaps we'd
>         rename String
>         as ByteString, and CharacterSequence as String.
>
>         In any case, just use #asByteString that does what you want.
>
>         Cheers,
>
>         -- 
>         Juan Vuletich
>         www.cuis.st <http://www.cuis.st>
>         github.com/jvuletich <http://github.com/jvuletich>
>         researchgate.net/profile/Juan-Vuletich
>         <http://researchgate.net/profile/Juan-Vuletich>
>         independent.academia.edu/JuanVuletich
>         <http://independent.academia.edu/JuanVuletich>
>         patents.justia.com/inventor/juan-manuel-vuletich
>         <http://patents.justia.com/inventor/juan-manuel-vuletich>
>
>
-- 
Juan Vuletich
www.cuis.st
github.com/jvuletich
researchgate.net/profile/Juan-Vuletich
independent.academia.edu/JuanVuletich
patents.justia.com/inventor/juan-manuel-vuletich
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