ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG15 N441

	Title: Character concept in POSIX standards

	Date: 1993-10-29

	Source: Keld Simonsen

	Action: for US NB consideration on WG15 action item 9305-24

	Reference: WG15 N372

	A comment on Nakahara-sans paper, his statement in the draft
	guideline, clause 1, that only "wchar_t" type in C conrresponds
	to the concept of a character.

	I would say that it is the multibyte character type of POSIX
	which corresponds to the concept of a character.

	The "wchar_t" type of C gives restrictions on hte represen-
	tation of characters, as they all must be represented by the
	same number of bits, and there is restrictions on the values
	which must be harmonized with the "char" type, this is not the
	case with the POSIX multibyte characters. C multibyte charac-
	ters cannot have a null byte in them, but allowing null bytes
	is needed for a general representation of a character. I
	believe that the POSIX multibyte character concept does not
	have this limitation. If not, the limitation should be removed.

	As POSIX standards currently use the multibyte character as it
	"character" concept, there is no need to change this. But there
	is a great need to use the character terms consistently across
	POSIX standards.