Before you continue this "Crusade" against Boost.Locale,
My view of this affair is as follows: Artyom advocates universal use of UTF-8 – see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049947/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmf... I believe this will be deeply unpopular with Asian programmers who, for whatever reasons, hate UTF-8 and love UTF-16. Artyom has also said that MSVC is "broken" and (as I understand it) that all programmers should use ASCII for locale's gettext translate. However, just because boost is a portable library and boost locale is used for localisation doesn’t mean that programmers are writing *portable applications*. In other words, people may well wish to USE boost locale in UTF-16 environment eg Windows and have nothing to do with UTF-8 or ASCII. As I understand it, those people are not well supported by the gettext bit of locale. I don’t think that can be resolved at this stage, but one should not try and present a necessity as a virtue – which will be resented.