[Python-Dev] Re: [Python-checkins]python/dist/src/Objects unicodeobject.c, 2.197, 2.198 (original) (raw)

Martin v. Löwis martin at v.loewis.de
Thu Sep 18 01:19:06 EDT 2003

"Tim Peters" <tim.one at comcast.net> writes:

So that puts an end to the claim that it's unlikely wchart will resolve to a signed type. Strangely, while char is a signed type under MSVC, wchart is an unsigned type.

I think people have learned, over time, that negative characters are evil. So MS chose to make wchar_t unsigned, as, for 2-byte Unicode, you might otherwise run into negative characters. For gcc, people probably also agree that negative characters are evil, but using long int causes no harm here: All assigned characters are still positive, as Unicode goes only up to 2**21.

Regards, Martin

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