[Python-Dev] String encoding

[Martin v. Loewis]

Fred L. Drake wrote

> I recall a fair bit of discussion about wchar_t when it was
> introduced to ANSI C, and the character set and encoding were
> specifically not made part of the specification.  Making a
> requirement that wchar_t be Unicode doesn't make a lot of sense, and
> opens up potential portability issues.

In ISO (!) C99, an implementation may define __STDC_ISO_10646__ to
indicate that wchar_t is Unicode. The exact wording is

# A decimal constant of the form yyyymmL (for example, 199712L),
# intended to indicate that values of type wchar_t are the coded
# representations of the characters defined by ISO/IEC 10646, along
# with all amendments and technical corrigenda as of the specified
# year and month.

Of course, at the moment, there are few, if any, implementations that
define this macro.

Regards,
Martin