Re: Proposal for 2 Byte Unicode implementation in gcc and glibc

[Florian Weimer <fw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> The standard also explicitely allows for a non-standard mode where
> Wide_Character can have other semantics. 

Not "other semantics", "other interpretations".  An implementation
might /interpret/ the values of Wide_Character differently, but the
permission doesn't suggest to change the representation of
Wide_Character.

On the other hand, in non-standard mode, you are free to anything you
want anyway.  But I doubt that compiler vendors are willing to change
the size of such a fundamental type.  Such steps tend to cause
maintenance nightmares.

> I personally think that sizeof(wchar_t) == 4 is the right thing to do in
> a C library and that Ada, Java, Win32, etc. will eventually have to find
> ways around their restrictions to 16-bit. UTF-16 is not always the right
> answer, because it is a multi-word encoding.

Some time ago, you strongly advocated for UTF-16.  Could you give some
details why you changed your mind?  Maybe sizeof(wchar_t) == 4 is
indeed the correct choice, but currently, I don't see why. :-/
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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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