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Subject: Re: [boost] [general] What will string handling in C++ look like in the future [was Always treat ... ]
From: Bo Persson (bop_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-20 13:07:23


Matus Chochlik wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]>
> wrote:
>>>
>>> OK, I see. But, is there any chance that the standard itself would
>>> be updated so that it first would recommend to use UTF-8 with C++
>>> strings.
>>
>> Well, never say "never," but... never. Such recommendations are not
>> part of the standard's mission. It doesn't do things like that.
>
> My view of what is the standardizing comitee willing to do may by
> naive,
> but generally I don't see why this could not be done. Other major
> languages (Java, C#, etc.) picked a single "standard" encoding and
> in those languages you treat text with other encodings as special
> case.

These are not good examples, as they are single company, single
platform languages. C++ is supposed to be much more than that.

>
> If C++ recommended the use of UTF-8 this would probably kickstart
> the OS and compiler vendors to follow or at least to fix their
> implementations of the standard libary and the OS API's to accept
> UTF-8 by default (if we agree that this is a good idea).
>

To name one set of obstacles: IBM, z/OS, EBCDIC.

Will work when all the legacy Cobol code has been converted to C++,
but not before that. :-)

Latest estimate was 200+ billion lines left to process.

Bo Persson


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