unsigned characters (was: Re: Octave/Win32 new binary package (2.9.12))

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-May-2007, Olli Saarela wrote:

| Proper handling of national
| characters in Octave might be a larger project, though. The data type 
| used is signed 8-bit which cannot hold the necessary codes:
| octave.exe:23> double(char(246))
| ans = -10
| This should return 246 (the code for letter ö).

Yes, the problem is that Octave uses std::string and the charMatrix
and charNDArray objects use char instead of unsigned char.  Fixing
this will touch many files.  I suppose we need to do it eventually,
but I don't see it happening before 3.0 unless people want to delay
the release for the time it will take to resolve all the little
problems that a large change like this is likely to create.

jwe