Why was wchar_t invented?

Question

Why is wchar_t needed? How is it superior to short (or __int16 or whatever)?

(If it matters: I live in Windows world. I don\'t

Answer 1

Except for a small, ISO 2022 japanese minority, wchar_t is always going to be unicode. If you are really anxious you can make sure of that at compile time:

#ifndef __STDC_ISO_10646__
#error "non-unicode wchar_t, unsupported system"
#endif

Sometimes wchar_t is 16bits UCS-2 sometimes 32bits UCS-4, so what? Just use sizeof(wchar_t). wchar_t is NOT meant to be sent to disk nor to the network, it is only meant to be used in memory.

See also Should UTF-16 be considered harmful? on this site.