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

[Paul Eggert <eggert at twinsun dot com>]

   Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 10:00:13 -0500
   From: Zack Weinberg <zack@rabi.columbia.edu>

   GCC should only care about the character set, not the rest of the
   locale.  Therefore, it makes sense to use the charset names from the
   iconv library (part of glibc 2.1, also in Solaris and probably
   elsewhere) which are the names standardized by the MIME RFCs.

This is a good suggestion.  I assume you're saying that GCC should use
directives like `#charset "SJIS"' rather than directives like `#locale
"ja"', since the other attributes of "ja" are not important for GCC.

Unfortunately, this suggestion doesn't solve the problem of unportable
directives in practice, because the charset+encoding names are not
standardized well either.  E.g for Shift-JIS, Solaris 7 has the
aliases "PCK" and "SJIS", glibc 2.0.108 has "SJIS", and MIME has
"Shift_JIS", "MS_Kanji", and "csShiftJIS".  It sounds like we might
slide through with "SJIS" for Shift-JIS, even though it's not in the
MIME standard; but for EUC-JIS, Solaris 7 has the name "eucJP", glibc
2.0.108 has "EUC-JP", and MIME has the aliases "EUC-JP",
"csEUCPkdFmtJapanese", and
"Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese"; so no single name
will do in practice for EUC-JIS.