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

[Per Bothner <bothner at cygnus dot com>]

> Paul is proposing that assembler files
> should be in the source character set; I think this is the wrong way.

Well, it seems clear that symbols in .o files have to be in a
locale-independent encoding.  That to me seems to mandate UTF-8.

It is less clear what encoding we should use for assembler files,
but given that the assembler translates to UTF-8, that the
assembler is primarily used for compiler output files, and
that assembly files are traditionally low-level and close
to the .o files, that suggests to me that assembler files
should also be in UTF-8, at least for compiler-generated
.s files).  Humans-written .s files will probably be in
the source locale, so we may need a pre-processor (possibly
gasp) to convert to UTF-8.

	--Per Bothner
Cygnus Solutions     bothner@cygnus.com     http://www.cygnus.com/~bothner