Standard Character representation

Albert Cheng (acheng@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Fri, 18 Apr 1997 17:20:11 -0500

I need a reference about the character representation standard
quoted on 10.5.2, p241, line 18. I hunt around the net and
found a reference of ISO-8859-1. (Here is the URL of one of the
references: "http://www.mrc-apu.cam.ac.uk/html/iso_table.html").
Is this the correct one to use? I saw other reference to ISO-10646.
What is it?

Anyway, I thought about the reason to require all MPI characters be
stored in a certain representation but could not come up with a reason.
Setting such a requirement would means any machine that uses a different
set of characters representation would have to do conversion between its
native character sets and the ISO-8859-1. But what good does it do?
Can someone explain the benefits of requiring such a standard for the
MPI_CHAR and MPI_CHARACTER data types?

If a standard should be used, is ISO-8859-1 the one to use?