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Re: thoughts on martin's proposed patch for GCC and UTF-8
- To: zack at rabi dot columbia dot edu
- Subject: Re: thoughts on martin's proposed patch for GCC and UTF-8
- From: Richard Stallman <rms at gnu dot org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1998 03:09:58 -0500
- CC: zack at rabi dot columbia dot edu, amylaar at cygnus dot co dot uk, martin at mira dot isdn dot cs dot tu-berlin dot de, gcc2 at gnu dot org, egcs at cygnus dot com
- References: <199812240211.VAA23752@blastula.phys.columbia.edu>
- Reply-to: rms at gnu dot org
I think you may have missed a few things. gas has no problem with
symbols in UTF-8 (I am told).
GCC works with many assemblers. I doubt that they all support UTF-8,
and it would be hard even to check them all. So I think we will have
to mangle non-ASCII byte values somehow in the .s files, whether the
encoding used is UTF-8 or not.
Anyway, there are other reasons not to always use UTF-8.
ascii <-> UTF-8 is a no-op, and gcc
does not currently accept non-ASCII identifiers, so no existing code
will be broken by the change.
This is true, but does not eliminate the problems.
Second, we
want to be able to link modules written in encoding X with other
modules in encoding Y.
This is a useful feature. However, not needing to specify what
encoding the file is in is also a useful feature.
These two features are inherently incompatible, so perhaps we should
give the user a choice, through an option.