Ned,

> Sorry. I was just saying that we have to be careful not to break the prior 
> assumptions.

> All previously-existing code expected that text streams would return 
> Characters that had a 1:1 mapping to the bytes in the file.

  I would say that it should break.  Given that the backward
compatiblity comes with a price and not so many applications actually
break, I'd rather set UTF-8 as the default converter for file streams
and MultiByteBinaryOrTextStream.

  We can do the reasonable care in the default image when loading
packages and applications.  The ones that break are the ones that do
some "tricky" thing in it.  I'd assume that the authors of such
packages are capable to fix their package while a casual user who just
wants to use non-latin1 characters may not able to figure out the
text converter concept.  I'd want them write working code, too.

-- Yoshiki