In article <001b01c41bdb$9882c030$8119fea9@FDI.LOCAL>, "Dale Peakall" <dale@peakall.com> wrote:
I have to agree. Programs should internally work in terms of fixed-width character sets. When string data needs to be imported/ exported locales should be used to perform the transformation.
The only fixed-width Unicode character sets are 32 bits wide; UTF-16 is not fixed width, it's only fixed width most of the time. You will have a hard time convincing me (and most other people, as far as I know) that it's a good idea for all of your strings to take 4x as much space as they need. A fixed-width character set is a win mainly when you are doing character-level manipulation, which isn't very common in any properly internationalized app because internationalized apps read most of their strings from a table and use only concatenation (where sprintf/boost::format are considered little more than concatenation) to produce new strings. If all you are doing is concatenation, you don't care about fixed-width characters. That is not to say that fixed-width character sets don't have their uses, but it is not at all as simple as "you should use them all the time". meeroh -- If this message helped you, consider buying an item from my wish list: <http://web.meeroh.org/wishlist>