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

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 23:02:40 -0800
   From: Per Bothner <bothner@cygnus.com>

   The locale for assembler files should probably also be UTF-8.
   I see no reason to support anything else.  What we might do
   is had gasp (the gas pre-processor) provide a hook for
   converting from other character sets.

As far as I'm concerned, gasp is dead.  It served a purpose for a
time, which was to provide a richer set of assembly language
operations.  However, gas itself now has all the interesting features
which were once found only in gasp (basically, macros).  I don't want
to see any plan that relies on using gasp.

   But gas itself
   should just assume UTF-8 - and generate ld symbols that
   are also UTF-8.  (A simple implementation is for gas to
   just recognize that bytes that have the high-order bit set
   should be treated as (part of) letters.)

This change has already been made in the development sources, and will
be in the next release.

Ian