It is not a matter of what I like or not, as that would mean adding something way more flexible than gettext to the standard, it is if one implementation choice, for technical reasons, can be seen as intrinsically more portable than another that choice has priority for standardization. Backwards compatibility with non-portable behavior was only a priority for Issue 6
Shware Systems <
address@hidden> wrote:
> This is not invention, as even Solaris allows you to turn it off with -s, as you point out. It may work fine for the charsets/charmap files Solaris historically provides to have escapes active as the default, but this does not equate to it being valid for all conforming charsets, if an application makes use of localedef, that I see. As such, from a portability standpoint, I view not processing escapes as the safer alternative.
What should be the reason for making the standard incompatible to the existing
practice since more than 30 years?
Gettext is a SunOS invention and other implementations are expected to follow
the definition from the reference implementation.
Do you really like to require SunOS to loose backwads incompatiblity?