Re: Locale-independent paragraph formatting

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 08:47:10AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Does anybody know if we could just write 'a' instead of U'a' and rely
> > on it being converted?
> > 
> > E.g. if you do
> > 
> > char32_t c = 'a';
> > 
> > then afterwards, c should be equal to 97 (ASCII value of 'a').
> 
> Why not?  What could be the problems with using this?

I think what was confusing me was the statement that char32_t held a UTF-32
encoded Unicode character.  I then thought it would have a certain byte
order, so if the UTF-32 was big endian, the bytes would have the order
00 00 00 61, whereas the value 97 on a little endian machine would have
the order 61 00 00 00.  However, it seems that UTF-32 just means the
codepoint is encoded as a 32-bit integer, and the endianness of the
UTF-32 sequence can be assumed to match the endianness of the machine.
The standard C integer conversions can be assumed to work when assigning
to/from char32_t because it is just an integer type, I assume.