GCC's Unicode use [was Re: Compile performance of Linux kernels in mainline gcc]

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Paul Schlie wrote:

> Maybe GCC's generation of Unicode friendly quoted message text should be
> explicitly requested as a command line option; thereby eliminating any
> potential confusion over expectations by either the user, and/or non-Unicode
> friendly programs which may subsequently parse GCC's output for whatever
> purpose?

Any programs parsing GCC's output need to set LC_ALL=C if they care at all 
about the text of error messages; this is nothing new as there have been 
translated messages for a long time.  If they only care for the message 
format "source-file:line: message" (a GNU standard, not GCC-specific) then 
they just need to expect messages in the locale character set - and 
translated messages again mean this has been the case for a long time.

There was a time when many programs adding Unicode support had their own 
special command-line options to enable it.  This was a mistake; it made 
things excessively difficult if you just want a working Unicode 
environment without fiddling with every program's configuration.  Setting 
environment variables such as LANG, LC_CTYPE and LC_ALL is the established 
way of controlling these things for all programs, not just GCC; and unlike 
five years ago, this works generally for most programs on a GNU/Linux 
system, with only a small proportion that don't yet work with Unicode.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    joseph@codesourcery.com (CodeSourcery mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)