Hi, I am interested in support of various character codes.
I suppose a certain amount of developers are interested in UTF-8 support. They are trying adding UTF-8 support for their softwares such as Xterm, GNU roff, and so on. I believe that UTF-8 support should be implemented using LOCALE technology, i.e., calling setlocale(LC_ALL,"");, using wchar_t instead of char, and leaving everything to the OS. The advantage of this method is: - the software will support not only UTF-8 but also many character codes in the world (including multibyte ones). This helps users to transit into UTF-8 smoothly and gradually. - the software can provide a united way to determine the character code to be used, i.e., LANG variable and so on. Otherwise users have to remember methods to enable UTF-8 mode for every softwares they are using. (For example, '-u8' option for Xterm.) - softwares which are already written using LOCALE technology don't need any modification. In other words, such softwares have already become to support UTF-8. Note that LOCALE programming is not difficult nor troublesome than UTF-8 programming. Solaris takes this model. Read http://docs.sun.com/ab2/coll.651.1/SOLUNICOSUPPT for detail. However, the current woody system (with locale 2.1.97-1) has only one UTF-8 locale of ko_KR.utf8. UTF-8 locales are needed for this model to work well. Why only it? --- Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
