Re: UTF-8 practically vs. theoretically in the VFS API (was: Re: JFS default behavior)

[<pcg@goof.com ( Marc) (A.) (Lehmann )>]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 02:40:25PM -0800, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
> Try it with a regular C locale. Do a simple
> 
> 	echo > åäö

Just for your info, though. You can't even input these characters in a C
locale, since your libc (and/or xlib) is unable to handle them (lots of SO
C functions will barf on this one). C is 7 bit only.

> Which, if you think about is, is 100% EXACTLY equivalent to what a UTF-8
> program should do when it sees broken UTF-8.

The problem is that the very common C language makes it a pain to use
this in i18n programs. multibyte functions or iconv will no accept
these, so programs wanting to do what you are expecting to do need to
re-implement most if not all of the character handling of your typical
libc.

Yes, it's possible....

> The two cases are 100% equivalent. We've gone through this before. There 
> is a bit of pain involved, but it's not something new, or something 
> fundamentally impossible. It's very straightforward indeed.

The "bit" is enourmous, as you can't use your libc for text processing
anymore.

Yes, it works in non-i18n programms, but right now most programs get
i18n support, which means they will all fail to properly handle
non-locale characters.

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