Matus Chochlik wrote:
On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
OK, I see. But, is there any chance that the standard itself would be updated so that it first would recommend to use UTF-8 with C++ strings.
Well, never say "never," but... never. Such recommendations are not part of the standard's mission. It doesn't do things like that.
My view of what is the standardizing comitee willing to do may by naive, but generally I don't see why this could not be done. Other major languages (Java, C#, etc.) picked a single "standard" encoding and in those languages you treat text with other encodings as special case.
These are not good examples, as they are single company, single platform languages. C++ is supposed to be much more than that.
If C++ recommended the use of UTF-8 this would probably kickstart the OS and compiler vendors to follow or at least to fix their implementations of the standard libary and the OS API's to accept UTF-8 by default (if we agree that this is a good idea).
To name one set of obstacles: IBM, z/OS, EBCDIC. Will work when all the legacy Cobol code has been converted to C++, but not before that. :-) Latest estimate was 200+ billion lines left to process. Bo Persson