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

[Paul Eggert <eggert at twinsun dot com>]

   From: Joern Rennecke <amylaar@cygnus.co.uk>
   Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 11:08:52 +0000 (GMT)

   pick a set of non-ASCII characters that are sufficient to identify
   the locale, and for each of them, state their name, followed by
   their encoding, followed by an ASCII delimiter that makes it
   possible to detect where the end of a multibyte encoding is.

I think that would be too brittle to work well in practice.

The magic cookie would be long and would be hard to explain to users.
For example, they couldn't just cut and paste the magic cookie's bytes
out of a recipe file; instead, they'd have to transliterate it to
their locale's character set, and they'd have to know what to do when
their locale can't represent all the characters.

Also, the set of characters would have to be large -- enough to
distinguish all the ISO 8859 variants, among other things.  Worse, the
set would have to change with time as new character sets were added to
GCC's set of supported charsets.  I'd hate to see a new GCC release
required because of the Euro!