From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
To: zack@rabi.columbia.edu
Cc: zack@rabi.columbia.edu, amylaar@cygnus.co.uk, martin@mira.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de, gcc2@gnu.org, egcs@cygnus.com
Subject: Re: thoughts on martin's proposed patch for GCC and UTF-8
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1998 00:05:00 -0000
Message-id: <199812250809.DAA05090@psilocin.gnu.org>
References: <199812240211.VAA23752@blastula.phys.columbia.edu>
X-SW-Source: 1998-12/msg00908.html

    I think you may have missed a few things.  gas has no problem with
    symbols in UTF-8 (I am told).

GCC works with many assemblers.  I doubt that they all support UTF-8,
and it would be hard even to check them all.  So I think we will have
to mangle non-ASCII byte values somehow in the .s files, whether the
encoding used is UTF-8 or not.

Anyway, there are other reasons not to always use UTF-8.

      ascii <-> UTF-8 is a no-op, and gcc
    does not currently accept non-ASCII identifiers, so no existing code
    will be broken by the change.

This is true, but does not eliminate the problems.

      Second, we
    want to be able to link modules written in encoding X with other
    modules in encoding Y.

This is a useful feature.  However, not needing to specify what
encoding the file is in is also a useful feature.

These two features are inherently incompatible, so perhaps we should
give the user a choice, through an option.