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Re: Genx

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Genx
• From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
• Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 13:20:22 -0800
• In-reply-to: <20040121195737.GH30165@s...>
• References: <20040121195737.GH30165@s...> <C85FBC6B-4B14-11D8-905C-000A95A51C9E@t...> <200401211840.i0LIeLo07627@d...>

jcowan wrote:

> I have argued privately that wchar_t is in fact the Right Thing here
> despite its variability in size (UTF-32 on Unix platforms,

Depends on the flavor of Unix; I've seen Unices with
sizeof(wchar_t) == 1, 2, and 4.

Also, few of them even state explicitly what encoding(s) are 
used for multibyte or wide characters.  EUC and Shift-JIS 
are the only multibyte encodings I've seen explicitly mentioned;
most manpages don't even say that much.

> UTF-16 on
> Windows), because it makes genx compatible with both standardized and
> non-standardized facilities, most especially "..."L strings.  Some
> conditional logic will be needed to interpret the input as UTF-16 or
> UTF-32, which can be based on sizeof(wchar_t).

It might not be either one.  On most Unices, the interpretation
of wchar_t characters depends on how the LANG and LC_* environment
variables are set (determined at runtime!)


> Hypothetical platforms
> where sizeof(wchar_t) == 1 can be neglected.

These aren't hypothetical -- I've seen one!  It's now defunct,
but still...  (sizeof(wchar_t) == 1 is actually a pretty good
design choice for certain types of systems.)


--Joe English

  jenglish@f...

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Genx
    • From: "Karl Waclawek" <karl@w...>
  • Re: Genx
    • From: Rich Salz <rsalz@d...>

• References:
  • Re: Genx
    • From: jcowan@r...
  • Genx
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: Genx
    • From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>

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