On Thursday 29 July 2004 11:16 am, Ned Konz wrote:
> Again, the default assumption is that the String will hold text -- even
> though there's nothing in it yet! It seems to me that the default converter
> for this stream should be the Latin1TextConverter. If a particular user of
> a String has a need for or knowledge of a particular encoding, they can
> change the converter.
>
> If there are cases where we're using files *as text* and this policy
> doesn't work, then they should be changed to specify their preferred
> encoding.

Going a bit further, we see that MultiByteBinaryOrTextStream is much too 
familiar with its clients:

open: fileName forWrite: writeMode

	| result |
	result _ super open: fileName forWrite: writeMode.
	result ifNotNil: [
		converter ifNil: [
			self localName = (FileDirectory localNameFor: SmalltalkImage current 
sourcesName) ifTrue: [
				converter _ MacRomanTextConverter new
			] ifFalse: [
				converter _ UTF8TextConverter new.
			].
		].
		self detectLineEndConvention.
	].
	^result.


I *really* don't think that the stream class should be guessing what its uses 
are. Is there a good reason for doing this?

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com