Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Long Chars
Message-ID: <3265@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: 31 Mar 88 18:15:26 GMT
References: <7447@brl-smoke.ARPA> <439@splut.UUCP> <8803250401.AA01184@champlain.dgp.toronto.edu> <7546@brl-smoke.ARPA> <4191@ihlpf.ATT.COM> <7586@brl-smoke.ARPA> <4216@ihlpf.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 15

In article <4216@ihlpf.ATT.COM> nevin1@ihlpf.UUCP (00704a-Liber,N.J.) writes:
|In article <7586@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
|>The problem with preempting "char" for small objects is that most C
|>code thinks that a "char" is big enough to hold a primitive unit of
|>text.  This is plainly wrong in some environments unless "char" is
|>made pretty large.
|
|[But K&R says] "Objects declared as characters (char) are large enough to
|store any member of the implementation's character set, ..."

Ah, but a "primitive unit of text" need not be in "the implementation's
character set".  In particular, the latter can be an 8-bit superset of ASCII
which implements some Natural Language characters with two-byte codes.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint