Re: UTF-8 fonts

[Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>]

Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> So is your aim to use UTF-8 internally in all cases or only when it is
> the selected character set?

My aim is to use normal metafied characters whenever possible and not
worry how the byte stream is encoded until the few points where we don't
have a choice, and then to use system functions.

> > We are going to assume that bytes without the top-bit set are ASCII, and
> > the remainder require mb* handling.
> 
> Isn't it easier to just do mb* handling on everything and not go around
> checking the top bit. The mb*() functions should do that sort of stuff
> for us. mbrtowc() can be used, discarding the returned wchar_t to, for
> example consume one character of a string. So it worries about whatever
> the top bit of the bytes are or whatever the underlying multi-byte
> character encoding requires.

This is where we have a choice, but I think treating even normal ASCII
bytes with arbitrary functions is going to be horrendously inefficient.
Personally I would be perfectly happy if the shell worked only with
schemes which were extensions of ASCII.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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