On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 12:20:31 -0500
Andy Walls <awalls@md.metrocast.net> wrote:

quoted text
> The signedness of char is ambiguous for 8 bit data, which is why an API would normally use u8 (or s8, I guess).
> 
> Since this is known to be character data, I would think char would be fine.  I am assuming C compilers would never assume multibyte "char"s.

char is 8bit in all modern C. I have used C compilers with configurable 9
or 7 bit char and such a machine is never going to run Linux without
serious insanity. Even grep in 9bit char is not fun...

The advantage of using u8 is that any casting goes the way you expect
whereas when working with UTF-8 things like

	int x = name[0];

may not produce the expected result otherwise.

Alan
--
unsubscribe notice
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/