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