Re: Using Unicode quotes (was: Re: Ada files now checked in)

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Sun, 7 Oct 2001 dewar@gnat.com wrote:

> The world is not close enough to Unicode and UTF-8 yet for this to make
> practical sense. In practice such a policy will simply lead to even more
> junk, since most people will just display the raw output of the compiler
> in standard ASCII.

UTF-8 output would only get displayed in standard ASCII if someone has
LC_CTYPE set to a UTF-8 value which their terminal doesn't support - which
is simply a broken configuration.  Clearly UTF-8 output would only be
enabled when nl_langinfo(CODESET) is available and indicates the locale to
be UTF-8.

The world is moving to Unicode; there are people using GNU/Linux systems
entirely in UTF-8 locales, and it largely works.

> If you tell me that this is definitely false, and that the correct translation
> will occur with the current version of GCC on all possible targets and
> environments, then I agree that this may make sense, but I would need to
> be convinced that this is the case :-)

The only problem cases would be with message catalogs on systems without
transliteration support in iconv (sufficiently recent GNU libc or GNU
libiconv).  We can always provide pre-transliterated catalogs for the
(locale, charset) pairs we want to support.  Note that at present message
catalogs in GCC do little enough useful anyway (too few up-to-date
translations).  We can also recommend that people with older or non-GNU
systems install GNU libiconv to gain the advantages of translations - and
other advantages in handling input in multiple character sets, for which
iconv is already used by the Java front end and will be used by the C and
C++ front ends.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk