> Don't we need a function that actually reports how curses is going to
> print a given string, rather than just reporting what the unicode
> standard says?

That may be useful, but

a) this patch doesn't provide that, and
b) it may not actually possible to implement such a change in a portable
    way as there may be no function exposed by the curses implementation
    that provides this information.

To put my closing this issue differently: I rejected the patch that
Victor initially submitted. If anybody wants to contribute a different
patch that uses a different strategy, please submit a new issue.