[plt-scheme] Why do MzScheme ports not respect the locale's encoding by default?

On Feb 18, Jim Blandy wrote:
> 
> It's my belief that users want their locale settings respected ---
> but they also want application writers to be more conscious of
> locale's effects.  Which is why I'm raising the issue here, and
> trying to provide background.  But in the end I want to be like John
> Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, sir, I change my mind."  If
> users don't actually like locales, if they find them confusing more
> often than they find them helpful, then it's hardly worth the
> trouble to support them.
> 
> So what do you think?

It's impossible to get a meaningful answer to that.  You'll always
have both kind of users, and you'll always have cultural differences
that grow out of whatever.  I can only give Israel as an example --
where native things are much farther away from English than the
average European language, but it's still much closer to English than
the average oriental language...  The result is that for a long time
nobody invested enough work to make things work, so it just became
stupid enough that anyone who cared would just use English for
everything.  Programmers in the company I worked at always used the
American versions of Windows, and most people my age who did anything
with computers still remember typing in reverse.  The result is that
you'll get many people there who will definitely prefer working ascii
software over locale-aware-but-hopelessly-broken junk.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!