Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 10:41:15 -0400 From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> To: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Message-ID: <20000404104115.B73509@sasami.jurai.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004032038040.7178-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>; from abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us on Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 08:59:51PM -0700 References: <3.0.6.32.20000403221617.008e2500@mail85.pair.com> <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004032038040.7178-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>
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You, Alex Belits, were spotted writing this on Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 08:59:51PM -0700: > > >-- I am Russian. > > > > So? > > So I don't want UTF-8 to be forced on me. Noone is trying to force UTF-8 on you. In fact, userland support of UTF-8 can (and should IMHO) be based around an environment variable a-la LANG which would tell programs whether they should expect pure 8-bit text or UTF-8 text. This will give you a pretty easy option to leave things as they are. > Charset definitions in MIME > headers exist for a reason. Yes, and the better mail clients (e.g. mutt) are already able to translate transparently between different equivalent charsets by using internally a common superset -- Unicode. Everyone should be able to use whatever charset they desire. > One of the most basic strengths of Unix is the ease with which text can > be manipulated, and how "non-text" data can be processed using the same > tools without any complex "this is text and this is not" > application-specific procedures. UTF-8 turns "text" into something that > gives us a dilemma -- to redesign everything to treat "text" as the stream > of UTF-8 encoded Unicode (and make it impossible to combine text and > "non-text" without a lot of pain), or to leave tools as they are and deal > with "invalid" output from perfectly valid operations. This is not a dilemma. Just about the only really different aspect of handling UTF-8 text is the algorithm for calculating the number of characters. Most of the existing programs can easily be tailored to treat the byte stream as either pure 8-bit stream or UTF-8 stream based on YOUR preferences. -- Anatoly Vorobey, mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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