16-bit wchar_t on Windows and Cygwin

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Feb  2 17:28, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Feb  2 17:02, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > But if you say that the application should convert UTF-16 surrogates
> > to UTF-32 before calling iswalpha: That's certainly a requirement
> > for Cygwin 1.7.x application that want to support the entire Unicode
> > character set. But it's outside of POSIX, and many GNU programs will
> > not want to include this added complexity. Just try to apply this
> > suggestion to gnulib's quotearg.c, then estimate the time someone
> > would need to apply it also to regcomp.c, strftime.c, mbscasestr.c,
> > coreutils/src/wc.c, and so on.
> 
> Cygwin's regcomp is taken from FreeBSD and is UTF-16 capable, including
> surrogate handling.  It only required two changes in the code.

Btw., I would be sure glad if Cygwin would use a wchar_t of 4 bytes as
well.  The problem is that this requires too many changes at once to
work right, and it would introduce a lot of backward compatibility
problems which would have to be handled.
If only the one's who decided that wchar_t in Cygwin should have the
same size as WCHAR_T in the underlying Windows would have thought twice
about the implications...


Corinna

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Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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