Bart Samwel <bart@samwel.tk> writes:
>
> C++ even introduced a special alternative character type "wchar_t" for
> this, just so that people could handle both 8-bit char* and 16-bit
> wchar_t* strings. In wchar_t* strings, 8-bit NULs are not a problem
> because only 16-bit NULs count (and AFAIK the Unicode standard does
> allows this to be interpreted as a NUL aka end-of-string). The
> downside of this solution is that no application actually uses it, and
> everybody is stuck with 8-bit ASCII plus a random local codepage
> unless special support is added.
wchar_t is not defined as 16-bits, but as "wide enough to hold any
character of the platform". For instance if the platform uses UCS-4,
then wchar_t is 32 bits wide.
(UTF-16 wchar_t violates this)
I don't clearly see how you want to use a 8-bit NULL to terminate a
(wider) wchar_t array... ?
> Why didn't they just upgrade chars to 32 bits and be done with
> it... :-/
Because "char" was and is still used to store multibyte /
variable-length / encoded characters.
