Glenn> I couldn't agree with you more. I'm deeply mired in attempting to
Glenn> build a cross-platform product (win,mac,8 unix flavors, qnx, os/9,
Glenn> psos,...) written primarily in C and consistently use UCS-2
Glenn> character data throughout. The most significant problems I face
Glenn> are:
Glenn> 1. lack of compiler support for wchar_t (and wide string literals in
Glenn> particular); or if a compiler supports wchar_t, then lack of control
Glenn> over whether 16-bits or 32-bits are used.
Glenn> 2. lack of standard runtime support for wchar_t signatures; i.e.,
Glenn> there needs to be a standard set of wcs entry points for string.h,
Glenn> ctype.h, stdlib.h, stdio.h, etc.
Lots of suffering to be had doing cross-platform multilingual stuff.
Inconsistencies across platforms is one of the major reasons we avoid
depending on compilers/OS/Windowing system on any platform (as far as
possible).
The ideal situation would have Unicode support at the OS level, but given what
I've seen so far, cross-platform multilingual development will be a
complicated mess for quite some time to come. Current vendor-provided Unicode
support varies widely in quality and coverage, not to mention being mutually
incompatible.
It will probably take some sort of singular event for vendors to agree on a
common Unicode API. Anything that affects hotly contested market share does.
Martin> Gets easier with overloading in C++. For some cases, i.e. ctype.h,
Martin> the problem is that the semantics have to be extended (and agreed
Martin> upon) before getting the libraries.
Java is getting better too. But we need this stuff yesterday, if not sooner!
And for less than the cost of a Boeing 747!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu
Mark Leisher "A designer knows he has achieved perfection
Computing Research Lab not when there is nothing left to add, but
New Mexico State University when there is nothing left to take away."
Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL -- Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery
Las Cruces, NM 88003
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:33 EDT