Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> For one thing, it ultimately comes down to the point
> that if we always have to assume the lowest common denominator we'll be
> unable to introduce any higher-level abstraction (which, naturally, imply
> some "smartness"). In a sense, your arguments can be interpreted as that
> every application _should_ have to implement the smartness by itself.
Neither I nor Colin say this - we don't say that smart abstractions
shouldn't be provided, merely that they should be explicitly chosen
options.

I think that streams should be able to handle ascii and binary, in the
sense Ned suggested, and also be able to apply various conversion
scheme, if so configured. There should be a line ending convention
detector. One of the configured conversions could use the detector +
whatever other tricks to be convinient. They should all be a message
send away, but only plain text should be default. 

Daniel