Re: [Squeak-VMdev] Proposal: VM string encoding

[Bert F. <be...@im...>]

Am 29.09.2004 um 01:33 schrieb Yoshiki Ohshima:

>   Hello,
>
> At Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:20:03 +0200,
> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>
>> Folks,
>>
>> I discussed this with Michael a bit and we came up with this proposal:
>>
>> 	* Add a new system attribute 1006 returning a string describing the
>> expected VM string encoding (http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/314).
>> 	* Values are "UTF-8", "macintosh", "ISO-8859-1", etc. (exact spelling
>> as in http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets).
>> 	* If attribute 1006 is not supported, assume "macintosh".
>>
>> Using an attribute instead of a primitive seems simpler than a new
>> primitive.
>>
>> I'm not sure but I think it's possible to have filesystem-specific 
>> file
>> name encodings under Unix. If neccessary, we should add a primitive to
>> FilePlugin to answer the encoding for a particular directory, using 
>> the
>> same values as described above. Anyway, we probably can leave that to
>> later.
>
>   We'll need a way to use possibly different encodings for:
>
>   * File name
>   * clipboard
>   * keyboard input
>   and possibly
>   * default system encoding
>
>   Assigning 1006 through 1008 would be good.

Can you describe the circumstances when these encodings are different 
from the default encoding? Are they at least constant over a session? 
Or can the encoding differ for distinct clipboard accesses or filename 
uses? If the latter, then a VM attribute would not be optimal.

- Bert -