[boost] Re: [program_options] Unicode support

From: Miro Jurisic (macdev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-04-06 11:58:05

In article <001b01c41bdb$9882c030$8119fea9_at_FDI.LOCAL>,
 "Dale Peakall" <dale_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> I have to agree.  Programs should internally work in terms of 
> fixed-width character sets.  When string data needs to be imported/
> exported locales should be used to perform the transformation.

The only fixed-width Unicode character sets are 32 bits wide; UTF-16 is not 
fixed width, it's only fixed width most of the time. You will have a hard time 
convincing me (and most other people, as far as I know) that it's a good idea 
for all of your strings to take 4x as much space as they need.

A fixed-width character set is a win mainly when you are doing character-level 
manipulation, which isn't very common in any properly internationalized app 
because internationalized apps read most of their strings from a table and use 
only concatenation (where sprintf/boost::format are considered little more than 
concatenation) to produce new strings. If all you are doing is concatenation, 
you don't care about fixed-width characters.

That is not to say that fixed-width character sets don't have their uses, but it 
is not at all as simple as "you should use them all the time".

meeroh

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