UTF-8 library

[George Russell]

Axel Simon wrote:
[snip]
> Let's stick to CChar and provide conversion functions then! (See below)

I would prefer the quick and dirty existing functions to remain, because they 
correspond to what people often what.  It should be specified that they work for
the ASCII characters with codes 0-127 if that's possible.

Since the majority of programmers probably neither know nor care about ISO-8859-1/UTF8/
koi8/whatever I think you will find that if you don't do this, most of them will
engineer their quick and dirty alternatives anyway.
[snip]

> For safety reasons I think the user should be aware of what he is doing.
> Just using withCString doesn't make the user aware of possible problems. I
> guess we need:
> 
[snip]
This is all too complicated for me.

Look, we seem to spend a vast amount of time on this list discussing Unicode and
internationalisation, but nothing actually gets done.  May I suggest that either
(a) we drop it and leave things to take their course, or (b) we don't drop it,
but set up a proper working party and mailing list, to come up with a standard?  
Unfortunately, as we have seen, this interacts with FFI, but that can't be helped.