> -----Original Message----- > From: Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> > Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2020 21:25 > To: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersm...@oracle.com> > Cc: Hans Åberg <haber...@telia.com>; Austin Group > <austin-group-l@opengroup.org> > Subject: Re: LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 > > Hi Alan, > > Alan Coopersmith wrote on Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 12:13:33PM -0700: > > On 6/25/20 8:31 AM, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > > >> Whether to standardize only C.UTF-8 or both C.UTF-8 and POSIX.UTF-8 > >> as synonyms looks a bit like asking for the best colour of a bikeshed. > >> Given that the standard already contains the redundancy of requiring > >> both "C" and "POSIX", maybe it is more consistent to also require > >> both "C.UTF-8" and "POSIX.UTF-8", but i don't think that matters > >> greatly. > > > The only thought I had along those lines was that I thought the "C" > > locale came from the C standard, and might be best left to the C > > committee to standardize, while this group controls the "POSIX" > > locale definition. I suspect those following the POSIX standards > > would end up implementing both, regardless of which specification > > defines each.
My impression Is that the C standard shied away from all concrete character-encoding issues, at least originally, where alternatives such as EBCDIC were still quite relevant. Although support for multibyte and wide characters were introduced, this was done in a very abstract way; I don't recall any mention of explicit encodings such as ASCII. As such, I think it would be fine for POSIX to standardize both POSIX.UTF-8 and C.UTF-8; I'd expect little opposition from the C standard committee to such a move. (Honestly, I don't know if the Microsoft Visual C library support a C.UTF-8 locale at the moment -- I'm pretty sure their system call level is still UTF-16). TL;DR: for consistency, I'd prefer POSIX to define C.UTF-8 as well as POSIX.UTF-8, even without explicit blessing by the C committee. I don't think they reserved parts of the locale namespace for themselves. -- Konrad Schwarz
