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

[Yoshiki O. <Yos...@ac...>]

  Bert,

> Okay. But how should the VM know which one is actually in use? I don't 
> know any system call to get a character set.

  It is often the case that there is no perfectly reliable way.
Reading the environment variables that the IM and window systems use
is the common way.

(Did I write EUC for clipboard?  The native encoding was
"x-compound-text"...)

> >> Or can the encoding differ for distinct clipboard accesses or filename
> >> uses? If the latter, then a VM attribute would not be optimal.
> >
> >   For file name, it has to be set in the earlier stage of VM
> > invocation, but the clipboard and keyboard input can be set later.
> > So, potentially read-write VM attributes would do it.
> 
> ... so why would we need to *set* it if it's constant? Can't the 
> conversion happen on the image side?

  Yes, it does and it doesn't have to be a read-write attribute. (Note
the word "potentially".)  But if the VM and underlying system support,
both X Compound Text and UTF-8 for clipboard encoding, it would be
nice if we can explicitly set to use UTF-8 so that wider set of
characters can be handled.

  I admit that setting the encoding concept could introduce more
headache, though...

-- Yoshiki