Re: [9fans] strangely typed functions in standard library

[quanstro@quanstro.net]

while true, this is not the reason for the function signature.  this is for
type promotion reasons.  Rune is still an unsigned short.  plan 9 does not
support ucs-4.

- erik

On Fri May 19 17:51:07 CDT 2006, viriketo@gmail.com wrote:

> Matt Stewart wrote:
> > The following functions are described as accepting a Rune, but instead
> > the parameters are of type long.  Why?
> > 
> > int runelen(long);
> > char *utfrune(char *, long);
> > char *utfrrune(char *, long);
> > 
>  From History in this wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32):
> 
> UCS-4 is sufficient to represent all of the Unicode code space, which 
> has 1114112 (= 2^20+2^16) code points and therefore requires only up to 
> hexadecimal 10FFFF. Some people consider it wasteful to reserve such a 
> large code space for mapping a relatively small set of code points, so a 
> new encoding form, UTF-32, was proposed.