Re: [PATCH RFC] Character set support

Andrew Cagney
2002-09-13T03:45:57Z

>> Two comments:
>> There's a lot of passing integers around to refer to a character.
>> That doesn't make a lot of sense to me; we should either be passing
>> char *, so that we can decode multibyte sequences, or using wchar_t
>> explicitly and autoconfing for it.
>>
>> I see hardcoded support for a couple of simplistic charsets; would it
>> be worthwhile to add (minimal!) support for UTF-8 in case iconv is not
>> available? Gcj is natively UTF-8, and I have some open Debian bug
>> reports about this.
>
>
> Absolutely --- as I say in the comments to charset.c:
>
> At the moment, GDB only supports single-byte, stateless character
> sets. This includes the ISO-8859 family (ASCII extended with
> accented characters, and (I think) Cyrillic, for European
> languages), and the EBCDIC family (used on IBM's mainframes).
> Unfortunately, it excludes many Asian scripts, the fixed- and
> variable-width Unicode encodings, and other desireable things.
> Patches are welcome! (For example, it would be nice if the Java
> string support could simply get absorbed into some more general
> multi-byte encoding support.)

I think this should be mentioned in the documentation.

Andrew

> But it seemed to me that supporting stateless variable-width encodings
> was going to be a *lot* of work. Specifically, how the printing code
> should change was a bit beyond me.
>
> Regarding `int' vs. `wchar_t': the wchar_t we could detect with
> autoconf is a host type. It has no necessary relationship to the
> `wchar_t' on the target. LONGEST might be a better choice than `int',
> but `wchar_t' is worse.
>