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

[Paul Eggert <eggert at twinsun dot com>]

   Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 10:57:10 -0500
   From: Ian Lance Taylor <ian@cygnus.com>

   I think it is reasonable for gcc to emit identifiers as
   uninterpreted byte sequences, and for gas to simply pass those
   identifiers straight through into the object file.

Yes, that should work.

   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.

Perhaps people are thinking that the user might want to link files
that were compiled in different locales.  E.g. one user compiles with
C-language function names in Shift-JIS, whereas user compiles with
them encoded in EUC-JIS.

These scenarios are fanciful now, because nobody compiles with
non-ASCII names.

I see no particular reason why the linker (or the compiler or
assembler) would have to support such scenarios.  Nobody is doing it
this sort of thing now, and I think few if any users will require this
behavior in the future.