RE: draft-hoffman-utf16-01.txt available

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

Hello Paul,

I have earlier suggested that in the ID for the UTF-16 registration,
we include some code segment that shows how to write out 16-bit
entities as big-endian or little-endian irrespective of the
architecture of the machine where the code is run. You have
been somewhat sceptical. I have now discussed this idea with
a colleague who is an expert in this field, and I have prepared
a tiny "test suite", which I have run both on a Sun (big-endian)
and on a friend's FreeBSD system (little-endian).

I invite you and everybody else to download this:
ftp://ftp.ifi.unizh.ch/outgoing/endian.tar

Once untared, the README file explains what to do.
If the diffs don't find any differences, the code
works. On some machines, the code may need some slight
adaption (newline conventions in the source code,
use of short for 16-bit units, availability and use
of fopen/fclose/putc), but I would be extremely surprised
if anybody found any machine and C compiler where otherwise
the code doesn't perform as it should.

Once we have tested this code to your liking, we can take
the relevant few lines and include it in the ID.

Regards,   Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-#  mailto:duerst@w3.org   http://www.w3.org