As you say, at various points the A funcs were talked about as legacy or deprecated. WinCE did not have them. During the win7 era refactor of things like kernel

As you say, at various points the A funcs were talked about as legacy or deprecated. WinCE did not have them. During the win7 era refactor of things like kernel32 and advapi, they were also kind of deprioritized, left in the compatibility wrapper and not the first class interfaces. I haven't followed in recent years but when WinRT was coming on the scene they were talking about not including them? But I think of the canonical name as not having either A or W. Rather what you get for TCHAR is a per compilation unit setting, and the A or W in the linker name is sort of an implementation detail. That is to say I'd internalized the world the macros presented, and labelled that as "what makes sense". In particular it is distracting from the semantics of the APIs to have the string type show up in the name. If they could do c++ style name mangling in plain C I feel like they might've and it'd be somewhat more "pure". The macro thing feels like sort of a hack to achieve this.