draft ANSI standard: one change that would *really* help Europe

[John Gilmore]

[This is posted to comp.lang.c because mod.std.c seems to be dead.  Love
those mod groups!]

While considering my point of view on trigraphs, Laura Creighton pointed
out that the problem is that Europeans really need more than a 7-bit
character set.

In that vein, one possible change to the ANSI standard would require
"char" to be unsigned.  This would double the number of characters
that a strictly conforming program could easily handle, and European
Unix systems could use an 8-bit character set in which the first 128
characters were USASCII.  I believe that the various Unix
internationalization efforts are already doing working in this direction.

No strictly conforming programs would be broken by this change,
since a strictly conforming program cannot assume whether char is
signed or unsigned; in fact, it will make MORE programs strictly
conform, since programs that assume char is unsigned will now conform.

In an 8-bit character set, all the ANSI punctuation as well as all
the national characters could be supported without kludges.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore at lll-crg.arpa
Call +1 800 854 7179 or +1 714 540 9870 and order X3.159-198x (ANSI C) for $65.
Then spend two weeks reading it and weeping.  THEN send in formal comments!