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6.6 RM 3.5.2(5): Alternative Character Sets ¶

"If an implementation supports a mode with alternative interpretations for Character and Wide_Character, the set of graphic characters of Character should nevertheless remain a proper subset of the set of graphic characters of Wide_Character. Any character set ’localizations’ should be reflected in the results of the subprograms defined in the language-defined package Characters.Handling (see A.3) available in such a mode. In a mode with an alternative interpretation of Character, the implementation should also support a corresponding change in what is a legal identifier_letter."

Not all wide character modes follow this advice, in particular the JIS and IEC modes reflect standard usage in Japan, and in these encoding, the upper half of the Latin-1 set is not part of the wide-character subset, since the most significant bit is used for wide character encoding. However, this only applies to the external forms. Internally there is no such restriction.