Who determines the ordering of characters

Question

I have a query based on the below program -

char ch;
ch = \'z\';
while(ch >= \'a\')
{
    printf(\"char is  %c and the value is %d\\n\", ch, ch);
    ch =         


        

Answer 1

These days, people going around calling your code non-portable are engaging in useless pedantry. Support for ASCII-incompatible encodings only remains in the C standard because of legacy EBCDIC mainframes that refuse to die. You will never encounter an ASCII-incompatible char encoding on any modern computer, now or in the future. Give it a few decades, and you'll never encounter anything but UTF-8.

To answer your question about who decides the character encoding: While it's nominally at the discression of your implementation (the C compiler, library, and OS) it was ultimately decided by the internet, both existing practice and IETF standards. Presumably modern systems are intended to communicate and interoperate with one another, and it would be a huge headache to have to convert every protocol header, html file, javascript source, username, etc. back and forth between ASCII-compatible encodings and EBCDIC or some other local mess.

In recent times, it's become clear that a universal encoding not just for machine-parsed text but also for natural-language text is also highly desirable. (Natural language text interchange is not as fundamental as machine-parsed text, but still very common and important.) Unicode provided the character set, and as the only ASCII-compatible Unicode encoding, UTF-8 is pretty much the successor to ASCII as the universal character encoding.