Multi-character literals are literals of the form 'abcd', are inherited
from C, and are not related to character encodings like UTF-16. They are
actually used, just not for the purposes of encoding text. They are
sometimes used to form a signature in file headers or network protocols.

For what it is worth, if C++ did not have them and someone were to
propose adding them, I would vote strongly against adding them due to
rather weak use cases and portability concerns. However, removal should
be motivated by technical arguments somewhat stronger than "these are
weird".

Tom.

On 3/6/24 4:19 PM, veronica alphonso via Std-Proposals wrote:
>
> 1.
> These are weird to handle because they basically depend on how
> many characters can an int encode, which is
> implementation-defined, so to use these well in a cross-platform
> environment you have to uh... constrast the number of characters
> with the size & alignment of an int
>
>
> Multi-character literals are unreliable to encode into an int because
> these depend on the implementation-defined size of int to know how
> many characters you can encode into, which in my opinion, is horrible.
>
> Also, multi-character literals are unnecessary, most codebases use
> wide, UTF-16 or UTF32 encodings to encode multi-character literals
> appropriately (yes, i know wchar_t is less than ideal, but lets ignore
> that for now).
>
> I don't think this feature serves any purpose nowadays, and the few
> codebases that may still use it should remove its support and get into
> the more reliable approaches, so this feature can be deprecated once
> and for all.
>