From: david@lang.hm Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:01:22 GMT Subject: Re: Do a better job at guessing unknown character sets Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > >> I think this makes sense from a "the world is moving to utf-8" >> standpoint, even if obviously some people might consider it a bit ugly >> to do per-line "guessing". >> >> Comments? > > Encodings are such a hassle, and probably > only because the inventors of ASCII just were narrow-minded enough not to > care. to be perfectly fair, at the time ASCII was invented it was done to eliminate the use of the different, incompatible character sets that were in use at the time. And it did the job well (I think the only surviver from those sets is EBCDIC, and only due to the legacy installed base) current character encodings are doing things that weren't dreamed of by anyone at the time. David Lang