Re: [boost] [general] What will string handling in C++ look like in the future

Subject: Re: [boost] [general] What will string handling in C++ look like in the future
From: Chad Nelson (chad.thecomfychair_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-02-08 17:17:26

On Tue, 08 Feb 2011 10:57:53 -0600
Marsh Ray <marsh_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On 01/21/2011 07:09 PM, Peter Dimov wrote:
>
>> The "ANSI code page" on Windows may well use Shift-JIS. "ANSI" is
>> just a(n unfortunate choice of) name, the actual encoding is not
>> fixed and has little to do with ANSI - it depends on the Windows
>> locale.
>
> My simple guideline is that any time someone uses the term "ANSI", 
> "ASCII", or "Unicode" to refer to an encoding scheme they don't know 
> what they're talking about.
>
> Seriously.

A good rule of thumb, but keep in mind that ASCII (or more formally
"US-ASCII") is the colloquial name for the seven-bit ISO 646 encoding,
and "ANSI" was used for Windows code-page 1252 because Microsoft based
it on an early ISO-8859-1 draft.[1] (The name is still in use in the
Windows API, but they say it's a "historical reference, but is nowadays
a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community.")

The blame for "Unicode encoding" can probably be laid on Microsoft
too.[2]

(Sorry to get pedantic on you, just taking a break before the
hopefully-final coding session on my UTF string library, which includes
converter classes for many common code-pages, including ascii (typedef
of us_ascii) and windows_ansi (typedef of windows1252)... I've been
swimming in this stuff for the last several weeks. ;-) )

[1]:<http://intranet.ipub.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=IWS-Chapter03>

[2]:<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.text.unicodeencoding.aspx>
-- 
Chad Nelson
Oak Circle Software, Inc.
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