3 ms·

I saw once an explanation, probably in the blog which used to be at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/ http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/, but I'm not finding it anymor

by cesarb 7y ago

I saw once an explanation, probably in the blog which used to be at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/ http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/, but I'm not finding it anymore. IIRC, the reason was that there is a maximum number of bytes per character for a legacy multibyte code page, I don't recall if it was 2 bytes or 3 bytes (there should be a #define somewhere for it), while for UTF-8 the maximum number of bytes per character is 4 bytes. Allowing a user to set the legacy code page to CP65001 (the legacy code page number for UTF-8) could crash programs which depended on the original limit.

juped 7y ago
Michael Kaplan's blog was indeed great; Microsoft took it down, then he started blogging elsewhere, then he unfortunately died in 2015, taking his second blog with him. Happily, archives are available at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/ http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  Oh. I remember reading his blog occasionally back in the day. I faintly remember there was a disagreement with Microsoft about his blog or at least some post in it, so he moved to an external blog. Great to see someone archived that stuff.
- cesarb 7y ago
  Yes, that was it, thanks! It's at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/14/665714.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/14/66571... (Can the CP_ACP be UTF-8?) which links to http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/02/06/368081.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/02/06/36808... (Can a codepage be changed? How about which codepage a locale points to?) and http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/04/656051.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/04/65605... (Behind Norman's 'Who needs Unicode?' post). "It is not possible given both the current architecture (which must work in both user and kernel mode) and also the inherent assumption in several subsystems (like USER) that the ACPs maximum number of bytes per character is 2." And the #define would have been MB_LEN_MAX.

by cesarb 7y ago

juped 7y ago

Michael Kaplan's blog was indeed great; Microsoft took it down, then he started blogging elsewhere, then he unfortunately died in 2015, taking his second blog with him. Happily, archives are available at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/ http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/

iforgotpassword 7y ago
Oh. I remember reading his blog occasionally back in the day. I faintly remember there was a disagreement with Microsoft about his blog or at least some post in it, so he moved to an external blog. Great to see someone archived that stuff.
cesarb 7y ago
Yes, that was it, thanks! It's at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/14/665714.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/14/66571... (Can the CP_ACP be UTF-8?) which links to http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/02/06/368081.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/02/06/36808... (Can a codepage be changed? How about which codepage a locale points to?) and http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/04/656051.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/04/65605... (Behind Norman's 'Who needs Unicode?' post). "It is not possible given both the current architecture (which must work in both user and kernel mode) and also the inherent assumption in several subsystems (like USER) that the ACPs maximum number of bytes per character is 2." And the #define would have been MB_LEN_MAX.