On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Dan Oscarsson wrote:
> To change to use UTF-8 as default the following will have to
> happen:
>
> 1) First all tools will have to be fixed so they can read and write
> both ISO 8859-1 and UTF-8. And when for example a C compiler works
> in UTF-8 mode, I must still be able to write:
> if (ch == 'ä')
> to compare my letter ä with a single character value.
Try something like
if (ch == L'ä'), instead
> This also means that for example saved e-mail, need to be saved
> in UTF-8.
> Before all tools are fixed, all must normally write data in
> ISO 8859-1 format. ISO 8859-1 with embedded UTF-8 would also
> be ok. (Note: some of Markus Kuhn's objections to having a
> base256 version of UTF-8 because it lacks essential properties
No. I'm sorry, you will have to stop demanding stuff which is patently
ridiculous.
Tools that deal with ISO-8859-1 mixed with UTF-8 cannot be written.
You can't even reliably autodetect between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8.
And I'm afraid it's too late to standardise on something other than UTF-8,
even if the will were there.
It might be possible to do some level of magic and get
dual ISO-8859-1/UTF-8 tools, but they would be evil and pointless.
I will _not_ be sending an evil hack of that order of magnitude off to the
maintainer of _any_ program. It would not get accepted, for good reasons.
If you wish to have programs that do stupid stuff like that, feel free to
make them do that.
-- Robert
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