On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 10:56:55 +0100, John Maddock <john@johnmaddock.co.uk> wrote:
No, rather than the error check was on by default. Some people want it off as the default.
As far as Unicode strings are concerned, the question is a little different. Is it well defined behavior to create a string that does not meet the Unicode invariants? If so, can ordinary operations break invariants, or is such dangerous activity restricted to "experts only" functions?
For what it's worth: the Unicode standard *requires* conforming implementations to neither accept nor generate ill-formed Unicode sequences.
Ref: Unicode Chapter3 C12 and C12a.
It does explicitly allow processing ill-formed sequences, or, at least, "talk[ing] about" concatenating two ill-formed code unit sequences to form a valid one, though. (Ch. 3, D30e.) Rogier