[Openmcl-devel] *default-character-encoding* should be :utf-8

[Stelian Ionescu]

On Mon, 2012-03-05 at 18:14 -0700, Gary Byers wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 5 Mar 2012, Ron Garret wrote:
> 
> >
> > On Mar 4, 2012, at 5:53 PM, Gary Byers wrote:
> >
> >> If your sources are in some legacy encoding - MacRoman is an example
> >> that still comes up from time to tine - then you obviously need to
> >> process them with that encoding in effect or you'll lose information.
> >
> > If you're using such legacy sources, you first step should be to
> > convert them to UTF-8 and then never touch the original again.
> > (The> same goes for latin-1, except that latin-1 is not a legacy
> > encoding.  It's in common use today, which is the main reason this
> > is a real problem.)
> 
> I agree, but the people who have these legacy-encoded sources that really
> should have been converted to utf-8 long ago have all kinds of flimsy excuses
> for not wanting to do so.  "It costs time", "it costs money", "it requires
> expertise", "it breaks backward compatibility"  ...  Sheesh.  It's almost
> as if these people live in the real world or something.
> 
> At some point, people with legacy code do need to invest in its viability
> (and in many cases that point was probably "years ago.")  It doesn't always
> happen, and this so-called "real world" thing that I keep hearing about seems
> to have something to do with that.  Given that situation (and the general lack
> of awareness of encoding issues that sometimes accompanies it), a default
> encoding that loses less information (ISO-8859-1) has more practical value
> than one that loses as much information as UTF-8 can.

Then use UTF-8b:
http://hyperreal.org/~est/utf-8b/releases/utf-8b-20060413043934/kuhn-utf-8b.html

-- 
Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
http://common-lisp.net/project/iolib

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