Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
What the *hell* is unicode??
Unicode is a modern computing industry standard for the consistant handling of texts (strings) that is not dependant on localized character sets as it contains one universal character set which contails over 110,000 different characters.
The most common implementation of unicode standard used is UTF-8 where each character can use up to 5 bytes of data to represent each of its characters instead of one byte per character that is used in ansi strings.
This makes both string types to be incompatible with each other.

You can read some general thing about Unocde here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
To read about some basics about using unicode support in delphi check the article below:
http://delphi.about.com/od/objectpas...-in-delphi.htm
And to read how unicode is used in FPC with which you are more familiar check the next page:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_Unicode_support