I am not entirely convinced that unicode has been retrofitted elegantly into Delphi. A lot of legacy functions using string (read: what is now AnsiString) have

I am not entirely convinced that unicode has been retrofitted elegantly into Delphi. A lot of legacy functions using string (read: what is now AnsiString) have been modified to still support string; so AnsiPos() for instance takes string, unless you use AnsiStrings unit. And that's just confusing. In a code base like the one I work with all the way back to Delphi 3, there are other legacy issues as well; such as the late arrival of TBytes, which meant that in olden days you had to handle binary data in strings. Now suddenly they are unicode strings are far less reliable for unicode. Of course, the compiler doesn't warn you about that, because it isn't clear what you were doing back then. Still, took us a year to get our code from Delphi 2007 to XE3. I am not saying Delphi is the worst thing ever, but I wouldn't say its legacy support is as elegant as you put it. There are issues, that are not noted by the compiler (unlike the deprecated flag for old functions and the like). Also the fact that it used to have both {$ENDIF} and {$IFEND} is amusing, but at least now they only want one; but you cannot change it because then it would break code that needs to be compiled in an older version of Delphi. Edit: But I will say this: I do believe unicode was introduced into Delphi as elegantly as possible. It's very hard to do truly elegantly, I'd imagine.