Squeak text vs. Internet text (was Re: [BUG][FIX] accented characters in email)

danielv at netvision.net.il danielv at netvision.net.il
Mon Nov 19 22:34:41 UTC 2001


I know a thing or two about convenient conversions, which I've learned
mostly the hard way, and my experience has brought me to loath them
quite badly. In this specific case, there is a very high proportion of
information kept, which makes either more tolerable, or more insidious,
depending on how long you want the data to serve...

Just keeping the bits as they came, and having one separation layer do
lots of CPU-wasteful conversion has the advantage *you can change your
mind later*.

Which is a kind of safety that's hard to beat when you can't name the
date on which the data becomes obsolete.

Of course, we don't have to agree on this - to each his own Stream
class...

Daniel

Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> > I feel the messages file should contain exactly what came down the wire.
> 
> The messages file currently does *not* have what came down the wire --
> Internet standard text uses CRLF terminaters, while Squeak uses CR-only.
>  We've already made one concession towards convenience, and we might as
> well continue.
> 
> The one interesting facet is that there is some hope that Squeak will
> switch to something like Latin-1 in the future.  If so, then we would
> have to convert message files *back* again.  However, if my hope is
> misplaced, and Squeak is really going to stick with the Mac encoding for
> a year or longer, then I still think the message files should be 
> 
> The reason has nothing to do with the encoding's complexity or with the
> time.  After all, #squeakToIso and its complement are already written. 
> Furthermore, the cost of reading the message from disk likely dwarfs the
> cost of the translation.  The reason I'd like the messages file in the
> same thing as Squeak's regular String format is that the code doesn't
> have to keep track of what kind of String's it is using -- $a is $a, and
> umlaut is umlaut.
> 
> Regarding index files, I like the decoding of MIME headers in advance,
> for the same reason: solve the problem once and then stop worrying about
> it.  If that is what Mike's patch does, then that is excellent.
> 
> By the way, is anyone testing this stuff on Filter Celeste?
> 
> 
> -Lex




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list