Proposal: require 7-bit source str's

[Peter Otten]

Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:

> If you disagree with that, is that because you think of Unicode as The
> One True Character Set which everything can assume is in use if not
> otherwise specified?  That's a long way from the world I'm living in.

It's even worse. I think conceptually there is "One True Character Set" of
which unicode is the closest approximation -- yes, I know that this
position is "idealism" by its philosophical definition.

> And the thing about standards is that there are so many of them to
> choose from.  Enforcing a standard somewhere in an environment where
> that is not the standard is not useful.  Try the standard of driving on
> the right side of the road in a country where everyone else drives on
> the left side.  Standards are supposed to serve us, it's not we who are
> supposed to server standards.

If you go to GB from the continent it is clear that you have to switch
lanes. You can still get it wrong but either completely or not at all.

Now consider a road you can drive on in many directions, say 100, with two
or three directions allowed simultaneously in one country. The best
available method to find out the correct direction would be to drive a few
kilometers and then get out of the car and look for damages in the car's
body. If there are dents you had an accident, so either you or another car
took the wrong lane...
How is it that many drive faithfully then? The dominant car-make has a
preference built-in. When they drive on the internet, everyone ignores the
signs and just drives on the same lane as anybody else... 

By the way, I'm not "fond" of unicode, There may even be problems that
cannot be solved in principle by a universal standard (like your sorting
across three locales). I just think unicode would make a better default
than what we have now and many apps that will break in the transition are
broken now - you just didn't realize it.

Peter