[Vm-dev] accents in unix using non-english languages
Andreas Raab
andreas.raab at gmx.de
Sat Sep 29 01:04:10 UTC 2007
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
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