Re: X11R7.5 and C.UTF-8

[Charles Wilson <cygwin@cwilson.fastmail.fm>]

Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Oct 2009, Ken Brown wrote:
> 
>> X11R7.5 doesn't like the (default) locale C.UTF-8.  If I start the server
> 
> technically speaking, there's "no such locale" as C.UTF-8,
> so I'd not expect portable code to accept it ("C" and "UTF-8" are
> mutually exclusive).

No, actually they are not.  The "C" or "POSIX" locale is defined
entirely in terms of character values -- not hexidecimal equivalents.
That is, "the set alpha shall contain 'a', 'b'..." etc.

The standard actually doesn't require that an implementation specify the
encoding in which those character values are represented at all. You
can, if you want, use 'HEX_CHAR', 'OCTAL_CHAR', and 'DECIMAL_CHAR'
representations -- which implicitly require a specific encoding -- but
the standard defines the 'C' locale entirely in terms of CHAR and
CHARSYMBOL, which are encoding-agnostic.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap07.html#tag_07_03

Personally, I think it's a hole in the standard that it doesn't actually
talk about "the POSIX locale with encoding Y" -- but then, they don't
want to show preference between ASCII and EBCDIC, so UTF-8 sneaks in there.

--
Chuck

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