Dolphin Smalltalk Unicode UI Proof of Concept

The package linked below is a very simple proof of concept for adding Unicode UI support to Open Source Dolphin Smalltalk (presently limited to ANSI text UI). 

Example Screen Capture:

Example Screen Capture

This simple example has been implemented by subclassing ShellView , TextEdit , and StaticText with Unicode aware subclasses.  I am not necessarily recommending this approach for a final implementation.  This was just done as a way of testing concepts.  The appropriate Unicode API function calls were added and used by the new view classes.  A method to return a UnicodeString from the Clipboard was also added. 

I would like to work toward adding more complete Unicode UI support to Open Source Dolphin Smalltalk. I am presenting my proof of concept in hope of getting community feedback about how best to move forward.  Ideally some of us can work together to make this happen.

Download my Unicode UI Proof of Concept Package (Released on 10/18/2016 by Chris Demers) here:
CJDUnicodeExpiriment.pac
See the package comment to run the example.  I suggest using a fresh image for experimentation.  See my c.l.s.d post for more info.

Further Background:

I used the US Unicode package by Udo Schneider during development for testing because he has fleshed out UnicodeString with a more complete implementation than is present in the base image.  However, my PoC package does not require it.  With his package you can inspect UnicodeStrings in a more useful way.

If you choose to load the US Unicode package you will need to use some tricks to get it to load.  It changes String processing methods which are used to load the package.  Here is what I had to do to load it:

  1.  Import US Unicode into STS as an edition.
  2.  Load all Object loose methods individually from the STS edition.
  3.  Import the STS package edition. A "comparing" category not found error halts the import.
  4.  Import the STS package edition again. No errors this time.