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From: chad@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (D. Chadwick Gibbons)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Must sizeof(int) exceed sizeof(char) in hosted environments?
Message-ID: <31@uwm.edu>
Date: 12 Sep 89 20:06:46 GMT
References: <1989Aug29.204254.3307@sq.sq.com> <1713@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <10908@smoke.BRL.MIL> <9487@cbnews.ATT.COM>
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Reply-To: chad@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (D. Chadwick Gibbons)
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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In article <9487@cbnews.ATT.COM> mark@cblpf.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) writes:
|The obvious reason why you would want big characters (other than tiny
|8 bit machines) is to support eastern character sets, such as the
|Japanese Kanji. 

	Exactly why the indentifier wchar_t was placed into the pANS.  A
small note of this is given in the latter parts of K&R. wchar_t is
implementation defined to be the largest value any particular character set
can within a given locale. 

|By the way, some other character sets (such as Chinese) don't fit in
|16 bits.  Assuming that since int=long that characters will always be
|smaller than int may not be safe.

	Possibly safe, but definately not portable programming.