Owen Shepherd did a splendid job on PDCLib after he took over the project from me in 2012. Locale support, multibyte and wide character support, thread support, ... When I got back into the project, and after a couple of "easy" changes and improvements, I realized that I did not understand the structure of Owen's PDCLib well enough to continue contributing, without a high chance of breaking things, or disrupting what Owen had done. So I returned to where I left off, and -- with the benefit of being able to look at Owen's implementation -- started to re-trace his steps. (Re-) implementing the functionality hopefully gives me a better under- standing of the inner workings. Whether I will eventually merge this branch back into default, just pick up again where Owen left off, or Something Else Completely, remains to be seen. Martin "Solar" Baute