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

Paul Schlie <schlie at comcast.net> writes:
> However do believe it's important to enable programming languages to
> more conveniently and consistently process arbitrary data, including
> those composed of multi-lingual character-sets, although not support
> its extended, or alternative localized formatting convention, use
> within the language itself, as I perceive it as ultimately being
> counter productive.

Seems a reasonable enough position.

Just to keep things from getting foggy: the change I'm suggesting
falls in your first category ("enabling programming languages ..."),
not the latter ones ("alternative formatting convention ...").


Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> writes:
> On Feb 19, Jim Blandy wrote:
> > 
> > I don't want to broaden the problem too much.  I'm not concerned
> > with proper bidirectional rendering behavior, input methods for
> > Hebrew, Japanese, etc. etc.
> 
> You've just hand-waved away a huge localozation problem, which is
> almost not addressed using locales.  I just do the exact same thing
> when I say:
> 
> > - It's not worth it.  Everyone should use Unicode code points and
> >   UTF-8.

What I meant to say was, "I'm not concerned with those things at the
moment", not "I don't care about those things ever."

I'm afraid that my suggestion, which is specific, local, and, I think,
a useful improvement on its own, will get swamped by the broad
skepticism about other aspects of localization --- much of which I
share.  For example, Alex Shinn's EUC-JP dictionary story was directly
relevant to the change I'm proposing, but Jens' and yours were
concerned with other behaviors that happen to fall under the umbrella
of "localization", but which don't relate to character encodings.

Perhaps folks here are more careful readers than what I'm used to, and
people are separating the issues, and just not talking about that.  Or
perhaps folks see ways that printf's behavior, bidirectional behavior,
and so on bear on the selection of a default character encoding
translation that I don't see.