Re: unicode (char as abstract data type)

Albert D. Cahalan (acahalan@cs.uml.edu)
Fri, 17 Apr 1998 23:44:24 -0400 (EDT)

Alex Belits writes:
> On Fri, 17 Apr 1998, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
>
>> Microsoft already did. Library support lets app developers
>> choose to use or ignore that support as they desire.
>> As time passes, more will choose to use the support.
>
> I can _not_ ignore it if it's there. As some discussion in IETF FTP-WG
> demonstrated, in some cases (such as FTP directory) the only way to handle
> unknown charset at the other end of the wire is to asume something about

Since when did we put FTP service into the kernel?

You really can ignore UCS2 at the kernel interface, because libc
can hide it from you. You may continue to live in a KOI-8 world.

This could even help you: if you ever need to mount an SMB share,
you can let the UCS2 --> KOI-8 conversion happen in libc instead
of in the kernel. With the Unix extensions, SMB over TCP/IP could
become quite popular with Linux users.

> I'm not even trying to go into details of handling memory-mapped
> text files in newsservers and other cases where charset information
> is definitely present (MIME), accessible through multiple protocols
> (NNTP, HTTP,

I don't see those in the kernel.

> local filesystem, AFS and CODA

If you mount a filesystem, you must know the encoding.

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