Bert Freudenberg wrote:
Perhaps a simpler step is to assume everything is UTF-8 and give people a little CS which turns all these converters under all circumstances to UTF-8?
This would break compatibility with older images - until new we tried to preserve backwards-compatibility.
I thought about this for roughly two seconds before changing the Windows VM and decided to break compatibility for the following reasons: * There are older VMs available, so if someone really needs the old encodings use one of those (or recompile from that code base) * This has never worked reliably to begin with. Neither the VMs nor the images were fully encoding-aware. In addition, the default encoding in the image was changed in 3.8. If *anyone* out there would have actually used it we'd be getting complaints about this left and right. * The changes are trivial to fold back into older images if that is desirable. * It hugely simplifies the VM code that deals with stuff coming from Squeak - there is only one path to take and if an function in the VM doesn't take its input as UTF-8 then it is broken and needs fixing.
The above were reason enough for me to break compatibility.
Cheers, - Andreas