Re: thoughts on martin's proposed patch for GCC and UTF-8

[Martin von Loewis <martin at mira dot isdn dot cs dot tu-berlin dot de>]

> I have misgivings about having GCC support multiple locales
> simultaneously.

So how about that: 

gcc/g++ process strictly-conforming input that is already in the base
character set (plus \u escapes, in a way that the standards
mandate. Object files are then UTF-8, (or U escapes for C++).

gcc/g++ also process input based on the current locale, and pass the
input unmodified to the output.

There is no interworking between the two (i.e: characters in the
current locale are not at all related to \u escapes)

This means that the compiler, in locale-aware mode, would not be
strictly conforming, but so what? People could ask their editors to
save files in C/C++ style encoding if they want portable source files,
or use filters.

If this sounds like a reasonable strategy, we only need to worry how
to combine the two algorithms, i.e. how we arrange processing of
identifiers and strings both using the C wchar functions, and
recognizing \u.

What do you think?

Martin