Creating multi-byte chars with ASCII

I4GL allows to create multi-byte characters with the ASCII operator. This is not supported by Genero BDL.

With IBM® Informix® 4GL, when defining the CLIENT_LOCALE environment variable for a multi-byte character set like BIG5, it is possible to create a multi-byte character by concatenating the bytes produced by the the ASCII operator.

With Genero BDL, the ASCII operator returns only valid characters, in the current application encoding.

For example:

MAIN
    DEFINE var VARCHAR(10)
    LET var[1] = ASCII(195)
    LET var[2] = ASCII(169)
    LET var[3] = ASCII(195)
    LET var[4] = ASCII(160)
    DISPLAY var
END MAIN

With I4GL (using UTF-8 multi-byte locale - make sure your terminal is correctly configured):

$ export CLIENT_LOCALE="en_us.utf8"
$ c4gl -o m.bin m.4gl && ./m.bin
éà

With Genero BDL:

$ export LC_ALL="en_US.utf8"
$ fglrun -i
Charmap      : UTF-8
Multibyte    : yes
Stateless    : yes
Length Semantics : BYTE
$ fglcomp m.4gl && fglrun m.42m
      (spaces)

Creating multi-byte characters by concatenating single bytes is bad practice and should be reviewed.