On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 12:07:27AM +0000, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> Harald Alvestrand wrote on 2000-11-15 17:59 UTC:
> > Is wcwidth() actually owned by some standard organization?
>
> I am not sure, what you mean by "owned".
>
> wcwidth() is defined at various places, for example by the X/Open SUS in
>
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/wcwidth.html
>
> It seems to be commonly considered to be a locale dependent function.
> That makes sense, because EUC, etc. have a width associated with every
> coding position (namely: wcswidth(s) == strlen(s)).
wcwidth() was introduced in the AMD 1 to the C standard in 1993.
> Beyond that EUC tradition, I see no reason why wcwidth() should depend
> in any way on the culture, language, or region. Since it is not a
> cultural convention, I don't think ISO DTR 14652 is the right place to
> put this. I see lots of excellent reasons for fixing wcwidth for all
> UTF-8 locales, as this will tremendously simplify fixed-width terminal
> emulator interoperability.
The new ISO POSIX standard .2b will include support for it in Charmaps.
And this information will thus be available via the locale.
14652 tries to be upward compatible with the POSIX locales.
As character sets are a part of the culturally dependent environment
it fits into 14652's scope.
Kind regards
Keld
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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