the new version of the code used to generate these tables forces a
newline every 256 entries, whereas at the time these files were
originally generated and committed, it only wrapped them at 80
columns. the new behavior ensures that localized changes to the
tables, if they are ever needed, will produce localized diffs.
commit d060edf6c5 made the corresponding
changes to the iconv tables.
unicode char data has both "W" and "F" wide types and the old table
only included the "W" ones. this omitted U+3000 (ideographic space)
and all the wide-ascii, etc.
i tried to go with improving the old binary-search-based algorithm,
but between growth in the number of ranges, bad performance, and lack
of confidence in the binary search code's stability under changes in
the table, i decided it was worth the extra 1.8k to have something
clean and maintainable.
also note that, like the alpha and punct tables, there's definitely
room to optimize the nonspacing/wide tables by overlapping subtables.
this is not a high priority, but i've begun looking into how to do it,
and i suspect the table sizes can be roughly halved. if that turns out
to be true, the new, fast, table-based implementation will be roughly
the same size as if i had just extended the old binary search one.
u_quark
Rich Felker