From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <16d2f27efa70d6b1ca98ab72d6c91245@mightycheese.com> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] ... in the Kingdom of Sources From: "rob pike, esq." In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 10:33:42 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2fe331e6-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > You must not understand it, then. It's just like char > except wide enough. Plan 9 "rune" is hardly different > apart from the names. ken and i wrote a paper about how and why it is more than 'hardly different' (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.pdf). there are two important differences. first is that (old) ANSI C did not provide any formatted i/o for wchar_t, rendering them essentially useless. second, more subtle but probably more central, the way plan 9 handles encoding errors with runetochar and chartorune, by introducing the 'error rune' 0x80, is vastly more convenient and effective than the error return values set by mbtowchar stuff. -rob