From owner-freebsd-hackers  Tue Sep 19 07:18:45 1995
Return-Path: owner-hackers
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id HAA06301
          for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 07:18:45 -0700
Received: from UUCP-GW.CC.UH.EDU (root@UUCP-GW.CC.UH.EDU [129.7.1.11])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with SMTP id HAA06281
          for <hackers@freebsd.org>; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 07:18:39 -0700
Received: from Taronga.COM by UUCP-GW.CC.UH.EDU with UUCP id AA16124
  (5.67a/IDA-1.5 for hackers@freebsd.org); Tue, 19 Sep 1995 09:03:10 -0500
Received: (from peter@localhost) by bonkers.taronga.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id IAA29446; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 08:54:02 -0500
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 1995 08:54:02 -0500
From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Message-Id: <199509191354.IAA29446@bonkers.taronga.com>
To: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Policy on printf format specifiers?
Newsgroups: taronga.freebsd.hackers
In-Reply-To: <199509182004.NAA08387@phaeton.artisoft.com>
References: <199509181147.HAA15090@exalt.x.org>
Organization: Taronga Park BBS
Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

>I personally have a number of problems with the encoding ordering for
>ligatured languages, like Tamil, Devengari, Hebrew, Arabic, etc., since
>there is an implied inability to use fixed cell rendering technologies,
>like X.

Why should the storage encoding and the display encoding and the internal
encoding be the same? You can have three encodings if you want.

The overhead is minimal, it's not like we're mandating display postscript.

>Rendering the file length meaningless and requiring the use of record
>oriented file systems with variant length records to handle data from
>fix length input fields from user interaction screens.

And this claim is just weird. This is an application issue... file systems
have nothing to do with it. If the only things you feed into the kernel
are multibyte character strings, you don't need any of this.