[aklug] Re: What should I consider before doing an install?

Arthur Corliss said, on 06/30/2011 01:30 PM:
> On Thu, 30 Jun 2011, Christopher Howard wrote:
>
>> At the risk of starting a flame war, that really isn't true. For starters, i find the mathematical/logical/programming/publishing symbols to be pretty helpful. Furthermore, it should be noted that the UTF-8 helps English typists by allowing them to occasionally insert foreign language content without switching to a totally foreign encoding. (E.g., ligatures and accents become available.)
>
> :-) I don't see this one escalating to flame war status. For what I do,
> though, I still couldn't care less. In 30+ years everything all my needs
> have been satisfactorily fulfilled by C & ASCII. As I said, non-English
> speakers are the primary beneficiaries of it. While I have dabbled in
> languages in the past, 100% of my computing is in English. Even when I
> e-mail Japanese friends I could always fall back on romanji.

True enough. It's clear that there's no real use case for your
situations, Arthur. It also keeps things very, very simple - and simple
is good, and is a goal of Nevaeh, IIRC. :-)

Batting around the pros and cons ... given that UTF-8 is
backwards-compatible with 8-bit ASCII -- virtually indistinguishable
until you use a non-ASCII sequence, which starts with a special preamble
-- there are no real drawbacks in my view other than:

* A little bit of (admittedly constant, but probably efficient)
interpretation overhead, watching for that preamble, and

* Some security risk around the fact that you can be presented with
letters that look exactly like the letters you think you're getting, but
are actually Cyrillic, etc.

If you want to leave the door open to developing anything that might
need to capture non-English text (internationalization of an app or web
site, for example), then I'd go UTF-8. Otherwise, there's probably no
real reason to other than the novelty/interest of being able to natively
use a plethora ("Yes, Jefe, you have a plethora!") of cool characters,
both international and otherwise (as CH said).

Royce
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Received on Sat Jul 2 17:24:07 2011