Re: yet another XEmacs fork;-)
Glynn Clements writes:
> "Retain the raw data or lose." There's no third
alternative, although
> sufficiently creative programmers can (and do) have their data and
> lose anyway. ;-)
Oh. I was starting to worry that they had decided that OS functions
were going to start automagically trashing^Wconverting everything for
you.
They *are* going to do that (in Python 3.0), based on the current
locale. The demand from losers^Hoverburdened mp3 jukebox programmers
late for their afternoon golf games is too high to ignore (yes,
they're using a Python binding to wxWidgets as you expected).
*However*, Python 3 is also going to provide a bytes interface for
those who want to do it right. (The last I looked the proposal was
for that data to be cached somewhere so that you could always go back
and look at it.)
I guess that probably sounds like a cop-out to you, though.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to hide malicious files, you had to
resort to tricks like putting them in a subdirectory named "..." or
embedding control characters in the name. Nowadays, you just need to
give them a name which isn't valid UTF-8 and many programs will
just pretend they don't exist.
So much the worse for many programs, and their programmers.
I really do see Unicode as a 95% solution here. It doesn't help with
the transition very much, but nothing will do that as long as there
are lots of lazy programmers and undemanding clients out there.
However, to the extent that Unicode provides an easy way out for them,
it will prevail, and it is a much more regular solution from the
programming and system design point of view than ISO 2022.
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