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From: arnold@skeeve.com
To: robpike@gmail.com, ralph@inputplus.co.uk
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Bell Foreign-Language UNIX Efforts
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2023 01:55:18 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <202303200755.32K7tIeW023352@freefriends.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKzdPgxYPS3-XAJh2bzBRxSeJPO4tyietcNY+eyUvfYGR8fHow@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Rob.

Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

> (Speaking of design by committee, the multibyte stuff in C89 was atrocious,
> and I heard was done in committee to get someone, perhaps the Japanese, to
> sign off.)

It's not lovely, but I wouldn't call it atrocious. It gets the job
done; code using it can handle multibyte encodings while being totally
character-set agnostic.  I speak from experience, gawk does this.
(I use the "restartable" routins - mbrlen() and so on.)

I understand that Unicode + UTF-8 solve the issue completely. But I'd
like to ask, in all seriousness and so that I can learn, given the world
as it was in 1989, how would you solve the problem? If you had designed
the C level routines, what would they have looked like?

Thanks,

Arnold

  reply	other threads:[~2023-03-20  7:55 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-03-19  5:00 [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
2023-03-19 13:32 ` [TUHS] " Diomidis Spinellis
2023-03-19 13:47   ` [TUHS] " Ralph Corderoy
2023-03-19 20:27     ` [TUHS] " Rob Pike
2023-03-20  7:55       ` arnold [this message]
2023-03-20  9:22         ` Rob Pike
2023-03-20 11:02           ` arnold
2023-03-20 15:44         ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-03-20 22:01           ` John Cowan
2023-03-20 22:28             ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-03-22  2:25       ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-22  2:52         ` Rob Pike
2023-03-22  7:12           ` Mehdi Sadeghi via TUHS
2023-03-22  7:33             ` Rob Pike
2023-03-22  7:40               ` arnold
2023-03-22 10:02                 ` Skip Tavakkolian
2023-03-22 10:09                   ` Skip Tavakkolian
2023-03-22 12:02                     ` Rob Pike
2023-03-22 22:33                       ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-03-22 23:33                         ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-03-23  0:01                           ` Warren Toomey via TUHS
2023-03-19 13:38 ` Edouard Klein

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