H98 Text IO

[Thorkil Naur]

Hello,

On Wednesday 27 February 2008 17:30, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 07:30:08PM -0500, David Roundy wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 12:06:59AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > > I think personally I'm coming round to the "always locale" point of
> > > view. We already have no cross-platform consistency for text files
> > > because of the lf vs cr/lf issue and we have no cross-implementation
> > > consistency.
> > 
> > I'm leaning in the same direction.
> 
> This has swung me too.
> 

Let me be contrary, then: The "always locale" idea depends, as I understand 
it, on some relatively global setting. And, especially in the context of 
functional programming, global things dont strike me as particularly 
appropriate.

This particular global thing also has the wonderful property of being 
modifiable. So it is actually a global variable.Some years ago, I had a hard 
time because some program that I hadn't written, but had to call from my 
program, occasionally changed the locale setting when called. The problem 
turned out, after much and exasperating work, to be that this changed the 
behaviour of sprintf: In Denmark we use commas for decimal points.

I know that we are not supposed to discuss a new and marvellous IO library on 
this thread, but let me mention what I would consider a very valuable 
property of this new library that I believe may affect what we do now to 
clean up the present affair: I would very much like to be able to specify the 
desired encoding myself, as others have mentioned, at some level of using 
this new library. So that the present library in principle could be 
implemented on top of this by specifying any desirable encoding used, 
including using the current locale setting or utf-8 or letting the encoding 
depend on the device or whatever one prefers.

So although my favorite choice at this moment is "always utf-8", I am much 
more concerned that the choice that we make does not exclude the possibility 
of creating this new and wonderful IO library that can be used easily to 
support the behaviour of the existing library (in whatever form it is changed 
into as a result of the present discussion).

> ...

Best regards
Thorkil