Edward Diener wrote: [...]
In my discussions on comp.std.c++, particularly with Mr. Plauger, I was more or less told that the committee had already made up its mind not to support wide character file names. He was pretty intolerant to the thought that wide character file names should be added with the proviso that their meaning should be implementation defined.
You might be interested in the upcoming LWG Issue #454: basic_filebuf::open should accept wchar_t names [27.8.1.3] Bill Plauger 30 Jan 2004 basic_filebuf *basic_filebuf::open(const char *, ios_base::open_mode); should be supplemented with the overload: basic_filebuf *basic_filebuf::open(const wchar_t *, ios_base::open_mode); Depending on the operating system, one of these forms is fundamental and the other requires an implementation-defined mapping to determine the actual filename.