Thanks, everybody, for writing about this.
The standardization process is one of consensus, and if the GCC
developers find some areas of disagreement here I think it unlikely
that the other POSIX implementers will agree with the proposed action.
Hence I am thinking of weakening it.
Currently the action proposes to insert the following text:
It is implementation-defined whether trailing white-space characters
in each C-language source line are ignored. Otherwise, the
multibyte characters of each source line are mapped on a one-to-one
basis to the C source character set.
How about if I propose to insert the following text instead?
The multibyte characters of each source file are mapped to the C
source character set on a one-to-one basis, with the following
exceptions:
* It is implementation-defined whether trailing white-space
characters in each input line are ignored.
* Each extended source character, and each sequence of characters
that would otherwise be recognized as a universal character
name, is mapped to an implementation-defined extended source
character or universal character name. If a universal
character name is continued by a backslash-newline across a
line boundary, the mapped output sequence contains the same
number of backslash-newlines as the the input, but their
location in the output sequence is unspecified.
Would this weaker action pose an undue burden on GCC? My sense from
the discussion is "no", but I'd like to double-check with the experts.
Thanks again.
