Glen Perkins wrote:
> For what it's worth, my personal convention is a bit
> different from the one
> described by Murray, unless I'm discussing C APIs.
> Ordinarily, I use the
> term "multibyte encoding" to make a distinction that means
> "non-single-byte
> [...]
> I've found this usage to be useful in conversation with
> non-specialists,
Generally speaking, it is pragmatic to accept this "vulgar" terminology in
everyday life. It is indeed inappropriate, but it enables one to communicate
with colleagues and bosses without having to teach unwelcome i18n lessons
all the time.
However, I agree with Glen that -- at the risk of being fastidious -- this
approximation must be absolutely avoided when talking about the C Standard
Library, or other C APIs.
In that context, the term "multi-byte characters" means just "char * ...",
and it is consistently opposed to "wide characters", that means "wchar_t *
....". So, accepting the approximation would just add confusion to
confusion.
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:01 EDT