how to add support for more Unicode characters?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic at xemacs.org> writes:

    Hrvoje> The problem with such questions is that they stop the
    Hrvoje> proceedings and feel like interrogation.  The user, who
    Hrvoje> more likely focuses on the work he's trying to get done
    Hrvoje> rather than on the minutiae of UTF-8, is not likely to
    Hrvoje> answer correctly nor be aware of what he did to deserve
    Hrvoje> the treatment.

Well, it's justified.  The file in question is either already corrupt,
or about to be corrupted (ie, if the user edits it and introduces
_any_ non-ASCII characters).  It is not in any known text coding.  If
the user intended to read in binary, he should be _strongly_
encouraged to do so.

    Hrvoje> It also doesn't "stop the proceedings" (to borrow the
    Hrvoje> phrase from Alan Cooper), while still alerting the user to
    Hrvoje> the problem.

_This is Ebola!_ The internal representation has been inadvertantly
exposed, and the user is totally unprotected.  The only safe thing to
do at this point (unless you are a coding system hacker) is to kill
the buffer and reread it in an appropriate coding system.

Do you think this is not a problem, or do you think that a user who (by
your assumption!) is lacking a lot of necessary clue is a better judge
of probable corruption than the robot which is about to mangle his
file by interpreting his byte-oriented intentions at the Mule (or
UTF-8) character level?

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