On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 09:03:40PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > But no one answered my original question; why are the format specifiers
> > for wide character functions different?
>
> Here's the answer: So that the a given format specifier corresponds to a
> given argument type.
>
> Format specifier Argument type
>
> %d int
> %s char *
> %ls wchar_t *
> %c int (promoted from char)
> %lc wint_t (promoted from wchar_t)
Changing between char and wchar_t at compile-time with macros (TCHAR) is a
hideous Windows hack. If you really want to generalize it, you could fork
printf to have a TCHAR type, eg:
const TCHAR *t = _T("abc");
printf("%t, %t", t, _T("def"));
(%t probably has some meaning in printf that I don't know off the top of
my head; I'm not suggesting you actually do this.) This type switching
is just a gross migration scheme, for programmers who want to distribute
both Unicode and ANSI versions of their programs (for Win9x compatibility).
I doubt this was the intent with the C wide functions having similar
parameters; that's just consistency.
--
Glenn Maynard
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
