[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


More information about the Vm-dev mailing list