On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 01:41:27PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net> writes:
> > In Debian, we do have plans to introduce a C.UTF-8 locale,
>
> Egad, isn't that a contradiction in terms?
Not entirely!
> C locale means POSIX behavior and nothing but.
Indeed it does. However, making LC_CTYPE be UTF-8 rather than
ASCII is both possible and still strictly conforming to the
letter of the standard. There would be some collation and
other restrictions ("digit" and other character classes would
be contrained to the ASCII characters compared with other UTF-8
locales). However, any existing programs using ASCII would continue
to function without any changes to their behaviour. The only
observable change will be that nl_langinfo(CODESET) will return
UTF-8, and it will be valid for programs to use UTF-8 encoded
text in formatted print functions, etc..
I'd just like to stress that this isn't happening anytime soon!
(Well, C.UTF-8 is possible now, it's just not hardcoded into
libc.so. The intention is to initially provide C.UTF-8 in
addition to C so that programs requiring UTF-8 support have a
locale guaranteed to be present on the system to meet their
needs.)
Regards,
Roger
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