J3/04-252 To: J3 From: Craig Dedo Date: February 16, 2004 Subject: ISO 10646 Character Set Required Number: Title: ISO 10646 Character Set Required Submitted By: Craig Dedo Status: For Consideration References: Basic Functionality: The Fortran standard should require processors to support the major variants of the ISO 10646 character set. Rationale: The ISO 10646 character set international standard has gained a large amount of popularity in the last 10 years. All variants of the Microsoft Windows operating system use ISO 10646 as its standard character set for operating system purposes. Almost certainly, ISO 10646 will be a major influence in the development of software during the life of the next standard. Any user who works in an environment that has ISO 10646 support will benefit from this feature. Support for character sets is inherently part of the language definition. Since there is no standard, there could be different and incompatible implementations from different vendors. Estimated Impact: Unfortunately, there are several widely used variants of the ISO 10646 character set. These variants include UTF-8, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UCS-2, and UCS-4. Due to varying demands for memory and processing power, different groups of software vendors use different variants of ISO 10646. Thus, it may be necessary to require support for most or all of the variants. Detailed Specification: This feature can be implemented by specifying different kind type parameters for each variant of ISO 10646 that the processor supports. I/O facilities will need to be upgraded in order to support input and output of ISO 10646 characters. There would be no need to require the support of the proper display of ISO 10646 characters on an output device or input of ISO 10646 characters using an input device. The physical representation of ISO 10646 characters would continue to be outside the scope of the standard. History: