Wide Character Support
Supporting larger character sets is an important aspect of internationalizing C. C9X provides for a wchar_t type and a host of related functions for dealing with larger character sets.
The stddef.h header file defines wchar_t as an integer type; the exact type is implementation dependent. Its intended use is to hold characters from an extended character set that is a superset of the basic character set. By definition, the char type is sufficient to handle the basic character set. The wchar_t type may need more bits to handle a greater range of code values. For example, char might be an 8-bit byte and wchar_t might be a 16-bit unsigned short.
Wide-character constants and string literals are indicated with an L prefix, and ...
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