Re: tolower()/islower() and char

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> The standard is explicit that the argument must be EOF or an unsigned
> char.  There is no way to support both true 8bit locales and
> magically fix this.

No way for ctype.h to do so independent of the rest of the system.  But
it's not at all hard to fix it from a libc design perspective; you just
need to choose a value for EOF that is out of range for signed char.

> '\xff' in Latin1 is a letter for example and EOF is not.

But nothing says (signed char)'\xff' == EOF.

Nothing except existing practice, that is; the C spec chose (rightly,
IMO) to support existing practice in this regard.

> I'm still shocked by how many developers have been using C for 20
> years and still manage to not use ctype.h correctly...

I've seen worse.  I've even corresponded with someone holding the
curious delusion that uncast NULL was suitable as a stdarg pointer
argument, apparently believing that all pointer types had to be
sufficiently similar, at least in an argument list, that this was
possible.

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