Subject: bug#7963: 16-bit wchar_t on Windows and Cygwin

From: Bruno Haible <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 17:02:56 +0100

Hello Corinna,

> And, please note the wording in SUSv4, for instance in
> http://calimero.vinschen.de/susv4/functions/iswalpha.html

Likewise in POSIX:2008, at the URL
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/iswalpha.html

>   The wc argument is a wint_t, the value of which the application shall
>                        ^^^^^^                         ^^^^^^^^^^^
>   ensure is a wide-character code corresponding to a valid character in
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>   the current locale, or equal to the value of the macro WEOF. If the
>   argument has any other value, the behavior is undefined.

What this sentence means in formulas, is that when an application passes
a 'wint_t x' to iswalpha(), it has to satisfy

   x == (wint_t) (wchar_t) x || x == EOF

> iswalpha takes wint_t, not wchar_t.  Since sizeof (wint_t) is 4 byte,
> the function can return the correct value, provided that the application
> converts the UTF-16 surrogate to UTF-32 before calling iswalpha.

When an application does this, is passes an invalid wint_t value to
iswalpha(), according to the spec paragraph that you have just cited.
So the application uses an extension to POSIX functionality, not
POSIX itself.

I see that Cygwin 1.7.x iswalpha() works in this way you describe (but
mingw's iswalpha() doesn't). So this means that gnulib's proposed
iswwalpha(wwchar_t) function could be implemented using iswalpha()
on Cygwin 1.7.x and will not cause the Unicode based tables to be
included in the executable. This is good and nice.

But if you say that the application should convert UTF-16 surrogates
to UTF-32 before calling iswalpha: That's certainly a requirement
for Cygwin 1.7.x application that want to support the entire Unicode
character set. But it's outside of POSIX, and many GNU programs will
not want to include this added complexity. Just try to apply this
suggestion to gnulib's quotearg.c, then estimate the time someone
would need to apply it also to regcomp.c, strftime.c, mbscasestr.c,
coreutils/src/wc.c, and so on.

For this reason I propose the wwchar_t type with an API that is similar
to POSIX <wctype.h> but includes the surrogate handling, rather than
pushing it into each application's code.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Carl Friedrich Goerdeler <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Goerdeler>