> So you can have a wchar_t datatype in C/C++ that stores UCS-4, but > your strings will most often not be arrays of wchar_t but of an > intermediate 16-bit size which gets parsed to 32-bit wchar_t by > very simple run-time scanners.
If wchar_t maps to UCS-4 then wchar_t* will map to UCS-4 and all of the C runtime support for string handling use wchar_t* for "wide" characters. It would not be possible to implement std::wstring on a system for which wchar_t was 32bits with it internally using a 16-bit unit storing UTF-16 since you are required to provide random-access iterators into the code-units and such an implementation could only provide bi-directional iterators (you could do weird things like storing indexes into the internal string, but the only reason for doing that would be to show that you could; the result would be worse in every way to an more straight-forward implementation that stored wchar_t characters). -- Jon Hanna | Toys and books <http://www.hackcraft.net/> | for sick children: | <http://santa.boards.ie/>
