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Re: 16-bit wchar_t on Windows and Cygwin
- From: Corinna Vinschen <vinschen at redhat dot com>
- To: cygwin at cygwin dot com, bug-gnulib at gnu dot org
- Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 22:38:42 +0100
- Subject: Re: 16-bit wchar_t on Windows and Cygwin
- References: <201101310304.42975.bruno@clisp.org> <4D46EA2B.1010307@redhat.com> <201102021229.04623.bruno@clisp.org> <4D49CB7C.5040000@redhat.com>
- Reply-to: cygwin at cygwin dot com, bug-gnulib at gnu dot org
On Feb 2 14:24, Eric Blake wrote:
> [dropping coreutils at this point]
>
> On 02/02/2011 04:29 AM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > Good point. I agree then that overriding wchar_t should better not be
> > done.
> >
> > Here's a new proposal:
> > - Define a type 'wwchar_t' on all platforms, equivalent to uint32_t
> > on Windows platforms and to 'wchar_t' otherwise.
> > - Define functions 'mbrtowwc', 'iswwalpha', 'wwcwidth', and similar.
> > Their definition will be a trivial redirection to 'mbrtowc', 'iswalpha',
> > 'wcwidth' on most platforms, and a use of libunistring modules on
> > Windows platforms.
>
> I like the idea of making a new type wrapper.
>
> Are you thinking of making a sane wrapping around either 4-byte wchar_t
> or which maps to 2-byte wchar_t but sanely handles UTF-16 (which makes
> it a thin wrapper on both Linux and Cygwin, but needing more work on
> mingw), or are you thinking that it is always a 4-byte type (needing
> lots more memory manipulation on cygwin to convert between 2- and 4-byte
> representations when using cygwin's functions, or else reimplementing
> everything from scratch by completely bypassing cygwin)?
>
> As to the name: I agree the opinion of others that xchar_t is easier to
> type and easier to avoid typos of a missing 'w' than wwchar_t. On the
> other hand, I can see wwprintf that takes wide-wchar_t values, but
> gnulib already has xprintf as a counterpart to xmalloc (which calls
> exit() if the printf fails for memory allocation or other non-I/O
> related reasons), so we can't blindly use 'x' instead of 'ww' when
> replacing existing 'w' in POSIX APIs.
May I suggest a compromise? What about "xwchar_t"? It avoids the
potential typo by accidentally dropping the second w. It still contains
"wchar" which implies that it's a *wide* char type. And the x could be
read as "extended".
Corinna
--
Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat
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