Programming and international character sets.

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <207 at jhereg.Jhereg.MN.ORG> mark at jhereg.MN.ORG (Mark H. Colburn) writes:
>Unfortunately, the C standard is still lacking in this area.  It is true
>that the attempt was made, however, X3J11 will have to go through another
>round if it is to be truly internationalized.

Not really; all the issues you raised in your posting were already addressed
in arriving at the current draft proposed C Standard, which had the assistance
and approval of several specialists in internationalization.  I don't want to
try to discuss the details here; however, I will remark that the wchar_t type
is NOT intended to be used in all the contexts where a character would
normally be used in an 8-bit environment.  ITSCJ indicated that the functions
provided were sufficient.  Others can of course be provided as extensions but
were not felt to be sufficiently important to standardize.

P.S. This is not to be taken as an official X3J11 statement!