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>]

> Also, if it is ever possible for an identifier name to include a
> byte value which gas will consider to be an operator, then it is
> clearly necessary for gas to permit quoting that byte value, and
> perhaps to do more general character set conversions.

Fortunately, UTF-8 only uses characters above 128, plus ASCII;
so you don't get special characters in identifiers, since they
are already banned by C.

> Several people have mentioned the linker as an issue.  To the best of
> my knowledge, the linker will permit any byte value except 0 to appear
> in an identifier.  I don't see why the linker has to change at all for
> any character set issues.

I've tried the binutils linker, and it is happy with any byte
sequence. Of course, there still might be linkers that do care about
characters above 128. Maybe we should perform some manual tests now,
or even have an autoconf test. OTOH, people will complain when the
linker complains...

Regards,
Martin