Why does wide file-stream in C++ narrow written data by default?

Question

Honestly, I just don\'t get the following design decision in C++ Standard library. When writing wide characters to a file, the wofstream converts wchar_t<

Answer 1

I don't know about wofstream. But C++0x will include new distict character types (char16_t, char32_t) of guaranteed width and signedness (unsigned) which can be portably used for UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. In addition, there will be new string literals (u"Hello!" for an UTF-16 coded string literal, for example)

Check out the most recent C++0x draft (N2960).