Re: [Groff] C++ solution of the char length problem

[Bernd Warken]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 11:59:30AM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
> While I agree that separating special and normal characters with a
> Boolean flag is basically a good idea, I think we don't need this
> additional complexity for a very simple reason: After conversion to
> Unicode, characters in groff won't be 16bit wide but 21bit.  This
> means we have to use (at least) 32bit integers anyway (even ISO 10646
> uses only at most 31bit wide characters IIRC -- mainly to make the
> number -1 always an invalid character code).  Using negative numbers
> thus appears very natural to me for representation of internal groff
> characters (which will normally be accessed with symbol names).

So the following will do:

class GroffChar {
  signed int data: 32;
public:
  ...
}

Bernd Warken