Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Long Chars
Message-ID: <7447@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 13 Mar 88 08:11:59 GMT
References: <12341@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 14

In article <12341@brl-adm.ARPA> TLIMONCE%DREW.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes:
>The "short char vs char" problem can't be solved very easily.  Why not a
>"long char".

This was basically what the Japanese originally requested.  The main
drawback is that any code that handles text characters (i.e. most
applications!) would have to be changed to use long-chars in order to
work in an international environment, and there would have to be
long-char versions of the usual string handling functions.  The
short-char proposal does not suffer from this drawback because a
char is already the right size to hold a text unit.  Its only
problem is that a fair amount of code has been written dependent on
the assumption that sizeof(char)==1, although some programmers have
been careful not to assume that all along.