Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh architecture discussion: format engine character set

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

Forget about locales, ICU, wide characters, all that nonsense.

If I was doing this, I would import the string and I/O functions from Plan 
9 and use those. They are native utf8 end-to-end, and they have been baked 
for a couple of decades now.

The only place we should pay attention to the locale is in strftime() when 
we print dates.

The direction you are all going in is madness.

We know the format of messages on disk, so that's a non issue. The hair 
pulling is in converting terminal input and output to/from a local 
display character set. Note that this is NOT the same thing as a locale. 
The solution is to mandate utf8 for all input and output.  Period.  It's 
time to recognize it's 2015.

--lyndon

P.S.  Yes, some systems won't be able to deal with this.  To quote one of 
my friend's kids: suck it up, buttercup.