Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: How does arch/tla handle encodings?

[Andrew Suffield]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2004 at 12:20:05PM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
> Is it worth it?  Is it worth a brisk but gentle revolution away from
> UTF-8-everywhere in order to lay down a foundation of software that is
> good for all humans?

Probably not, if only because character encoding is not a solved
problem, and at this point, it's more or less inevitable that unicode
is going to have to change lots more before it's a realistic option.

Trying to tackle that one right now can only result in a solution that
will be hopelessly broken in a few years, simply because the problem
wasn't even properly understood at the time.

There are plenty of languages for which character sets don't even
exist yet. It's almost certain that at least one of them will break
some fundamental assumption.

A disruptive, incompatible conversion is never justified unless, at
the very least, you can reasonably believe that it will be the *last*
such conversion.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
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