toupper, isupper.., and the flamewar in comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d

[Doug McDonald]

Ok, its time to move this here. There has been a very big flamefest in
comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d about 8 bit chars and editors for use with Icelandic.

What does this have to do with comp.lang.c? The answer is, of course,
the isupper, islower, toupper, tolower functions or macros. Now that
ANSI C is the standard for C, and all compiler vendors have had plenty
of time to implement it [no flames on that - it is a fact], what should we
expect those four functions to do? I think we just should say "be
done with this problem" and, for 8 bit (or nine or 10, but not 16) chars,
just use a table. But how to set the table for all possible languages.
A 1024 byte table is not very big - but 1024 bytes for all possible
locales is obvious a bit large. What to do?


I see a big set of tables, which exists as a separate file, which
an installation mode of the program reads at install time and loads the
correct tables (or tables, allowing limited settability inside the
main program) into the data part of the executable.


The outcome of the flamewar on c.b.i.p.d is clear: this is NECESSARY
for a lot of different programs. We need to figure out the best way to
do it.


Doug McDonald