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

At 18 Feb 2005 20:34:37 -0500, Jim Blandy wrote:
> 
> [...] do you think most users want applications to respect locale
> settings --- and specifically, the character encoding --- or do you
> think most users would like applications to ignore them?

Most users don't even know what character encodings are and could care
less.  They do, however, want software to interact together, which
causes complications.  A lot of legacy software uses hard-coded
encodings which means even the C solution won't help completely with
this.  Include the fact that even historically the same locale used
different encodings for different purposes (such as 7-bit encodings
for mail), people often receive mail/browse the web and access other
data in arbitrary locales, and it's pretty much impossible to write
decent internationalized applications without something like iconv.

Corollary to Zawinkski's Law:

  All applications use iconv, or are replaced by ones that do.

-- 
Alex