Runes

I am about to implement the rune handling code for VSTa, because MADO
and bitblt depend on it. I have basically decided the following:

1) A rune will be 16 bits and use Unicode
2) The I/O of runes will support UTF/2 as the core, and EUC, JIS, and
   whatever else eventually. These are all multi-byte formats.

Before I start coding, I'd like to hear comments on the following:

1) Is it necessary to implement the ANSI-defined wchar_t functions (it
   seems few people use them)?
2) Does anyone see a need to support locales? From my experience, they
   offer little benefit to the average user, as users seldom
   understand them, and if they do understand them, the locale
   implementation is usually limited.

My initial reaction is to provide similar functionality to the normal
string library, and to use similarly named functions, and to add a few
extra convenience functions. For example, I plan to offer runelen(),
to return the number of runes, and runeblen() to return the number of
bytes a rune string takes up, and conversion between rune and
multibyte strings.

If anyone has any comments now, please offer them.

I have been too busy recently to do much with MADO, but I have some
free time coming up, so I hope to make some headway. I have also
started toying with the CORBA IDL compiler from SunSoft, with the
eventual aim of using it as a base for server definitions and RPC
definitions (ie. define a server in IDL, and then the compiler would
generate the server skeleton, and code to access it). MADO has
priority over this, so progress gere will be slow initially.

nick
Received on Mon Feb 14 00:16:03 1994