[darcs-users] locking

Jamie Webb j at jmawebb.cjb.net
Thu Mar 9 21:14:07 UTC 2006


On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 02:57:59AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Old Mac is ASCII-compatible, but Darcs won't recognize the newlines
> (since they're carriage returns).

That's presumably only because no-one has cared enough to fix that.

> How do you know you've got UTF-8 if you don't know what a character
> is?

That's exactly it. You don't need to know. All Darcs needs to care
about is whether or not it's ASCII-like. It doesn't matter if it's
actually UTF-8, ISO8859-1 or cp1256. Darcs will do the right thing.

>     Jamie> That's a bad way of putting it. Very little is
>     Jamie> 'UTF-8-compatible'. The point is that UTF-8, ISO8859-x,
>     Jamie> etc. are backwards-compatible with ASCII.
> 
> And so are lots of encodings that you really don't want to have to
> think about.

That's okay. I don't need to. Neither does Darcs.

It may be /advisable/ for Darcs users (and indeed the rest of the
world) to favour UTF-8, but there's no reason to /require/ it. I don't
think Darcs is in a position to spearhead that particular revolution.
It's already got Haskell on its hands. :-)

>     Jamie> I'd suggest that the current design is better.
> 
> I'm dubious.

Under what circumstances would your version be an improvement? Bearing
it mind that most people are more interested in interoperability with
their current setups than on jumping aboard a standards crusade?

-- Jamie Webb




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