[asdf-devel] ASDF and character encodings

[Daniel Herring]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2012, Robert Goldman wrote:
> On 4/20/12 Apr 20 -6:43 PM, Daniel Herring wrote:
>>
>> ASDF does not need to support arbitrary encodings in system definition
>> files.  UTF-8 is the simplest and most portable solution for non-ASCII
>> characters in system definitions.
>
> This seems mostly true.  The only exception I can really think of is for
> metadata.  What if the author's name uses non UTF-8?

What character in the author's name cannot be encoded in UTF-8?

Yes, there are some hieroglyphs and other ancient character sets not in 
UTF-8.  Are there any gaps in coverage for current languages that have 
other character sets?

This will be an inconvenience for those who usually use a different 
local-specific encoding, and I think it is less than the inconvenience to 
the whole community if we try to support other encodings in the 
definition files.

- Daniel