ISO WG14 politics

[rja]

Doug Gwyn's comments are very well taken indeed and I heartily agree.

I've worked on international software for some while now (dating back
to a thesis I wrote on the topic of computers handling the Japanese
and Chinese languages) and the Danish proposal is needless and not
useful even in their peculiar environment.  There are other reasonable
approaches to handling their environment that would not place the undue
burden that the Danish proposal constitutes.

I share the concern about the lack of library support for wide characters.
I'm not sure that there is sufficient existing practice in the area to
really warrant changing the standard.  If changes do come to pass at the
ISO level to add additional wchar_t library support, I agree that such
changes should be in a separate wide character library(libraries) and be
made in a manner consistent to and conforming with the existing ANSI standard.

I am also concerned because there are at least two different standards
for the size of character sets larger than 8 bits (in particular there
are different groups working on both 16-bit standards and 32-bit standards).
The 16-bit vs. 32-bit problem I believe to be inappropriate to try to resolve
at this time.  I do rather wish that the committee had gone with 
'long char' rather than wchar_t, but I can live with the decision already
made.

Randall Atkinson
randall at virginia.edu

Opinions are solely those of the author.