Re: codecvt problem

From:
Seungbeom Kim <musiphil@bawi.org>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 07:38:53 CST
Message-ID:
<itgam9$kcj$1@usenet.stanford.edu>
On 2011-06-17 05:42, Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:

According to my manpage of mbstate_t, you _must_ initialize it using
memset(). That means that any implementation defining it as a pointer must
not actually read it as a pointer, but only use access variants like
memcpy(), memcmp() etc.


An implementation may guarantee further details and rely upon others that
the language standard does not, so I guess in that case the implementation
relies either on the fact that all-bits-zero is actually a null pointer,
or on the fact that mbstate_t is not a pointer, and guarantees that memset
will work. It's hard for me to imagine such an implementation that defines
mbstate_t as a pointer and bothers to access the value only through memcpy,
memcmp, etc., though one is possible.

I think it's a defect in the language standard (probably that of C) that
it mentions "an initial conversion state" several times but fails to
provide a means to achieve one. All the C standard says is:

"A zero-valued mbstate_t object is (at least) one way to describe
an initial conversion state." (7.24.6/3)

The language standard should have provided an initializer, or specified
further on what types mbstate_t could be so that more explicit forms of
initializers could be used.

This means that all "clean" initialisations
mentioned in this thread (e.g. "mbstate_t s = {};" or "mbstate_t s =
mbstate_t();") are actually not guaranteed to work.


I cannot understand why not. Can you explain it further?

--
Seungbeom Kim

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