[asdf-devel] source file encoding

[Raymond Toy]

On 4/8/12 12:28 PM, Nikodemus Siivola wrote:
> On 8 April 2012 17:36, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I think requiring a few marginal hackers doing weird things
>> to specifiy :encoding :default is a small price to pay for everyone to be able to specify
> 
> I disagree. Consider this:
> 
> X has a system that used to be in, say, LATIN-9. He uses latin-9 at
> home, and everything works fine. His users either use it as well, or
> at least another single-byte encoding.
> 
> ASDF is updated, and X's user reports breakage. Everything works fine
> for X, because he didn't update ASDF yet. So he updates ASDF, and X
> updates his system to specify :LATIN-9 (or :DEFAULT, or whatever).
> 
> Now another of his users reports breakage, because /they/ didn't
> update ASDF yet -- and their ASDF doesn't support :ENCODING, so things
> break. They update ASDF, which in turn breaks another :LATIN-N system
> they were using.
> 
> The potential cost is non-trivial, and I really don't pretend to know
> eg. how many Japanese hackers user non-UTF-encodings in their source.
> 
> IMO encouraging people to add :encoding :utf-8 is much saner.

I agree with this. If the library needs a special encoding, let the
library specify it.  ASDF won't break any existing definitions and will
support systems just fine.

I think it's a strong indication that the current asdf behavior has
worked without too many complaints about encodings is a good sign that
whatever the default is works pretty well as the default.  (Being
illiterate, ASCII is all I need, except when I want to play with other
encodings on purpose.)

Ray