Thorsten Glaser wrote:
Albert Cahalan dixit:
Unless plain "C" goes UTF-8
Not going to happen, it’s not binary-safe. (I fought that in
MirBSD with the OPTU-8/16 encoding scheme.)
Why not? Note that usual functions work on bytes, not on characters, and
on POSIX utilities the old/classical options work on bytes by default.
POSIX introduced new options for characters. E.g. the -c in 'wc' means
really bytes, not characters (which is given by -m). Not so logical, but
compatible with the expected old behaviour.
POSIX was discussing if is is "legal" to have a UTF-8 POSIX/C locale.
IIRC the doubts was about the language in the standard, not about real
problems. OTOH they acknowledged that real bugs could appear.
OTOH I use by default the UTF-8 locale, because I don't expect that
Debian will corrupt my data. And I think system utilities will do
the right things with locale.
I start to think that moving C to UTF-8 will be the real simpler and
faster way to *hide* most of the encoding bugs.
ciao
cate
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