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,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pobox.com/~mellon/
"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton
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