Re: 10646, UTF-2, etc.

> > ... "the hard part is making the code understand that octets
> > and characters are not synonymous".  Once that is done, the details --
> > how the two are related, whether a character is 16 or 32 bits, etc. --
> > are very much secondary, particularly if libraries etc. are designed
> > to hide the implementation details properly.
> Untrue. 16 bit or 32 bit are not implementation details.
> With 16 bit wchar_t, you can write
>       array[(unsigned)char_code]
Not on my pdp11, you can't!

But in any case, this misses the point.  You can always write code that
depends on details, if you try.  The point is that if you make a modest
effort to write clean code, then 16 bits vs 32 bits *is* a detail, one
that can be changed by changing a header file and recompiling.  Avoiding
a few inappropriate practices -- such as assuming that a particular
datatype is small enough to be usable as an array index -- suffices to
make code independent of this particular detail.

                                         Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                          
henry(_at_)zoo(_dot_)toronto(_dot_)edu   utzoo!henry