Re: [EXPERIMENTAL] 1st draft of Encode

[Graham Barr]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 05:09:22PM -0500, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> > 1. Is there any chance of a null mapping to convert a string containing 
> > UTF8 but not marked to one so marked, and vice versa?
> 
> "Define 'containing UTF8'.  This string contains UTF8."
> 
> I purposefully left that one out.  I think that would be is too
> low-level and dangerous.  The moment someone turns on the UTF8 flag on
> data that isn't, we have invalid data, something that expects UTF8 the
> flag to mean anything will be misled.  Red core dumps and vert data
> corruption rampant in field argent, that's the coat of arms of an
> unhappy coder.

Hey, we have been here before.

Consider the LDAP protocaol which needs exactly this. PDUs from the
server contain octet's. But embedded in there are strings which
are UTF8 encoded.

> Later, when we've got IO disciplines, we should be able to mark
> an input handle to in utf8.

Nope. With LDAP the whole stream is not UTF8, just bits of it.

Graham.