wchar_t values

[John Gilmore]

peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Why can't the Danes define a character set, and preprocess it into trigraphs
>for compilation? There's no reason the editing character set needs to match
>the character set the compiler sees.

They don't even need to preprocess it, they can just use a compiler that
handles that input character encoding.  Nothing in the standard prohibits this!
If they use characters outside the standard C character set, their code
won't be portable to other character encodings, but what else is new?

steve at taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) wrote:
> This is the kind of attitude which annoys those in the world whose native
> language is not English...

Americans are not boors or uncivilized because they invent programming
languages that use the entire ASCII character set.  Not guilty!

> One member's name contains an umlaut (two horizontal dots above a vowel).
> He asked us to imagine how it feels NEVER to be able to see your name
> spelled correctly in any computer correspondence.

Why doesn't he get a better computer?  Surely some local company sells
machines that include umlauted letters.  I correspond with a Swede
whose name is Torbj|rn; it looks funny in the States (a vertical bar in
the middle of the name), but should look fine on his computer in
Sweden.

And my windows all use ISO Latin 1.  If Torbj|rn would send the
umlauted letter in that standardized character set, it would look right
in both the States and in Sweden.

> Another member asked how we would feel if, for example, the letters
> 'l' and 'r' would always be considered equivalent, and the letter 'f'
> was forbidden.

Why don't we stick to discussions of the C language rather than generic
character set guilt trips?  So far, NOBODY has proposed a way to change
ANSI/ISO C so that the full local character set could be used in
identifier names in portable programs.  So any language that adds some
alphabetics beyond ASCII's is going to have some words that just can't
appear in portable C programs.  Note I'm saying PORTABLE; on your
local compiler you can do what you want.

> So let's turn Peter's question around:  Why can't the Americans use
> a preprocessor to convert ASCII source into some international
> character set before compiling?

Americans *can* use a preprocessor to convert ASCII source into some
international character set before compiling.  What's the point?

Compiler vendors are free to choose whatever input character set and
encoding they want to implement -- including ASCII, Danish local
characters, JIS, ISO Latin 1, or others, as long as it contains the
required character set specified in the C standard.  All of these do.
What is your complaint?
-- 
John Gilmore   {sun,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu   gnu at toad.com   gnu at cygnus.com
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