The char-TCHAR-wchar_t Pendulum in Windows API Native C/C++ Programming

I started learning Windows Win32 API programming in C and C++ on Windows 95 (I believe it was Windows 95 OSR 2, in about late 1996 or early 1997, with Visual C++ 4). Back then, the common coding pattern was to use char for string characters (as in Amiga and MS-DOS C programming). For example, the following is a code snippet extracted from the HELLOWIN.C source code from the “Programming Windows 95” book by Charles Petzold: static char szAppName[] = "HelloWin"; // ... hwnd = CreateWindow(szAppName, "The Hello Program", ... After some time, I learned about the TCHAR model, and the wchar_t-based Unicode versions of Windows APIs, and the option to compile the same C/C++ source code in ANSI (char) or Unicode (wchar_t) mode using TCHAR instead of char. In fact, the next edition of the aforementioned Petzold’s book (i.e. the fifth edition, in which the title went back to the original “Programming Windows”, without explicit reference to a specific Windows version) embraced the TCHAR model,…