Delivery of the argument aside, this does seem like a slam-dunk to me. What's the rationale for not optimizing the common case? (i.e. that all reads and writes are done to same encoding). Or am I missing something?
Thanks, Phil Eduardo Cavazos wrote: > Hello, > > I'm not crazy about the new unicode api. > > Unicode support is essential so I'm not arguing against having it. What bugs > me is the api. > > It's criminal that the programmer is forced to state the encoding at every > corner where a filename is involved. Stream data is either "text" or "binary" > and it's often clear from the context which of the two is the case. For > example: > > "out" [ . ] with-file-writer > > OK, it's clear that I'm printing source code to a stream, so it's "text" > not "binary". And in my case, *every friggin time* that I'm putting text into > a file, it's utf8. It's sooo silly that I'm forced to say "this is utf8" > every time I'm dealing with text. > > If I write some text to a file and later I read the same file, guess what... > the encoding doesn't matter. If I'm exchanging data with somebody else (or > something else) then I *might* start to care and it's nice to be able to > override the encoding. > > In all of my code, I have no need to care about the text encoding. > > I would prefer a default text encoding of 'utf8'. Any stream could have it's > encoding changed by setting it's 'encoding' slot. I think that an api based > on a dynamic 'encoding' variable would have been worth exploring too. To be > fair to folks for whom 'utf8' is not a good default, there should be a way to > change the default. > > For dealing with binary files, I'm in favor of words like 'read-byte' > and 'write-byte'. These would simply ignore the encoding. > > The new changes impact all code which use streams. Had we used an api based > on > an 'encoding' variable or a "default" encoding, most of the existing code > would have continued to work. The exceptions would have been code that dealt > with binary streams. > > Slava and Dan already know how I feel about this. I just wanted to put out a > voice on this issue. > > Ed > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft > Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. > http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ > _______________________________________________ > Factor-talk mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/factor-talk > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Factor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/factor-talk
