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

[Richard Stallman <rms at gnu dot org>]

    OK, how about this proposal?  I've tried to formulate it to address
    everybody's concerns:

You've designed this based on the assmuption of converting everything
to UTF-8.  It's useful to offer that as one alternative, and your
design seems reasonable as a way to do it.  But there also needs to be
a mode which does not convert.

There are some demanding situations in which people would want to link
together the results of compiling files written in different
encodings, but that will be rare.  It will be much more common for
people to use one encoding.  So the default mode should be not to
convert, and in that case, GCC doesn't need to know what the encoding
is (unless /u is used).

I expect that all general-purpose libraries will limit themselves to
ASCII for symbol names for many years to come.  That is the wise
choice for anyone writing a general-purpose library, and the GNU
coding standards will call for that.  (Perhaps the situations will be
different in the future, if use of Unicode become universal, but that
will take years.)  If and when it happens, we can change the
standards.