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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: International Collating Sequence
Message-ID: <30721@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 12-Oct-87 18:33:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.30721
Posted: Mon Oct 12 18:33:13 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Oct-87 01:29:27 EDT
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>    Why not strip the string routines from libc into a shared library,
>    that can be dynamically linked at run time? Or even just strcmp()
>    and strncmp()?

Because:

	1) Some systems will permit you to link a program completely
	statically, so they won't be affected by changes to the shared library.

	2) This makes it harder to add support for new collating sequences, as
	the person adding this support has to build an entirely new shared
	library.

	3) This also makes it harder for a program to *change* the current
	language in midstream; one could imagine a program (e.g., a
	multilingual word processor) wanting to do so.

Also, changing "strcmp" would cause problems, because some program might want
to support *both* a particular natural language's sorting order and the
"native" byte-string sorting order.

The X3J11 committee developing the ANSI C has already come up with schemes to
support sorting orders other than the native byte-string order; these schemes
permit programs to change the sorting order on-the-fly, and to use "strcmp"
directly if this is called for.  Typical implementations will, one hopes, load
the sorting order information from a file, based on the current locale.  This
file will be tailorable by people without the source code, so that, for
example, a vendor could distribute the system worldwide and have people in each
country tailor it for their environment (since developers at the home office
may not know that country's environment as well as the people in that country).
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com