Long Chars

[Karl Heuer]

In article <4216 at ihlpf.ATT.COM> nevin1 at ihlpf.UUCP (00704a-Liber,N.J.) writes:
|In article <7586 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
|>The problem with preempting "char" for small objects is that most C
|>code thinks that a "char" is big enough to hold a primitive unit of
|>text.  This is plainly wrong in some environments unless "char" is
|>made pretty large.
|
|[But K&R says] "Objects declared as characters (char) are large enough to
|store any member of the implementation's character set, ..."

Ah, but a "primitive unit of text" need not be in "the implementation's
character set".  In particular, the latter can be an 8-bit superset of ASCII
which implements some Natural Language characters with two-byte codes.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl at haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint