I suppose A in Win32A.inc stands for ANSI and not ASCII. (W in Win32W.inc stands for Wide-char)

I took one example from MS Docs:



Currently in Win32Axxx.inc beginning remarks stating:


This is not big deal, but ANSI should be the correct term? (Correct me if I am wrong)

BTW, where do I look for 80386.inc? Thank you so much, Tomasz, for the hard work. I am now studying your tutorial "Learning binary file formats (work in progress)".[/b]

The Windows docs are also wrong. Unicode it not wide-char.

In fact Unicode doesn't specify any encoding, it is just character codes with no notion of how to encode them in ASCII, ANSI, UTF-8, or anything.

You're right, I looked up its definition in the reports, Unicode can have narrow characters as well (not just wide characters).

That is a different meaning of narrow/wide.

Windows uses wide-char to mean using two bytes per character (and sometimes four with the surrogate pairs).

Unicode uses narrow/wide to describe the visual representation of the glyph and the spacing to the next character.

UTF-16 was a mistake. Microsoft really fucked up and should've used UTF-8 like the rest of the world.

Quoting this just because it can't be stated enough. Windows should boot up with an apology to programmers until they convert all the APIs to UTF-8 and make UTF-16 an option for legacy support.

It's even worse when you add UCS-2 file names into the mix.

"Consistency? What's that?"

Oh, yeah, Microsoft should really be sorry for being nearly the first to adopt Unicode standard and to follow the Unicode Consortium recommendations.

Who cares about the Consortium changing their minds 5 years later when Win32s, Windows NT 3.1, Windows NT 3.5, Windows NT 3.51 and Windows 95 had already been shipped thus making it nearly impossible to move to UTF-8 without breaking software written by other guys who also wanted to adopt Unicode as fast as possible.

They (Microsoft) should have let Linux guys be the first ones and get blamed. Oh, sorry, something makes me think that we would still use and love UTF-16 in that case, and Microsoft would be blamed for being slow to adopt Unicode. After all, it’s mostly politics.