Hi Rob.

Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

> (Speaking of design by committee, the multibyte stuff in C89 was atrocious,
> and I heard was done in committee to get someone, perhaps the Japanese, to
> sign off.)

It's not lovely, but I wouldn't call it atrocious. It gets the job
done; code using it can handle multibyte encodings while being totally
character-set agnostic.  I speak from experience, gawk does this.
(I use the "restartable" routins - mbrlen() and so on.)

I understand that Unicode + UTF-8 solve the issue completely. But I'd
like to ask, in all seriousness and so that I can learn, given the world
as it was in 1989, how would you solve the problem? If you had designed
the C level routines, what would they have looked like?

Thanks,

Arnold