SoC 2009: BSD-licensed libiconv in base system

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:42:46PM -0400, David Schultz wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 03:49:04PM -0400, David Schultz wrote:
> > > ...but isn't this moot at present because there are no
> > > widely-accepted encodings that include characters that
> > > aren't supported by UCS-4? Citrus doesn't seem to support
> > > any such encodings in any case.
> > 
> > "Just" using UCS-4 not necessarily buys you the desired affect.
> > Keep in mind that UCS-4 is still a variable width encoding, as soon as
> > you factor combining characters and some other interesting parts in.
> 
> This is true, but unfortunately C99 wasn't really designed to
> support combining characters. I don't understand how this relates
> to the present discussion.

The main reason people want to use wchar_t is because they want to use a
fixed width presentation of characters. Just using UCS-4 doesn't give
you that if you ever want to support Level 2 and higher. It also
highlights UCS-4 is not that state independent as it is often thought to
be. That is again something undesirable.

Joerg