From: Robert Ramey [mailto:ramey@rrsd.com] Sent: October 19, 2004 12:19

So I always presumed that there was a "unicode" locale that implemented this as well all other required information. Now that I think about it I realize that it was only a presumption that I never really checked. Now I wonder what facitlities do most libraries do provide for unicode facets. I know there are ansi functions for translating between multi-byte and wide character strings. I've used these functions and they did what I expected them to do. I presumed they worked in accordance with the currently selected locale and its related facets. If the basic_string<wchar_t>::operator<(...) isn't doing "the right thing" wouldn't it be just a bug in the implementation of the standard library rather than a candidate for a boost library?

The unicode standard is rather young, compared to the C++ standard library. It seems the original authors of std::locale and std::basic_string just prepared for some expected flexibility. That doesn't mean all the complexities of today's unicode could fit into that. Just look at the size requirements alone compared to 'wchar_t'... Regards, Stefan