Magic UTF-8/Windows-1252 encodings

[Johannes Bauer]

On 29.08.2016 17:59, Chris Angelico wrote:

> Fair enough. If this were something that a lot of programs wanted,
> then yeah, there'd be good value in stdlibbing it. Character encodings
> ARE hard to get right, and this kind of thing does warrant some help.
> But I think it's best not done in core - at least, not until we see a
> lot more people doing the same :)

I hope this kind of botchery never makes it in the stdlib. It directly
contradicts "In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess."

If you don't know what the charset is, don't guess. It'll introduce
subtle ambiguities and ugly corner cases and will make the life for the
rest of us -- who are trying to get their charsets straight and correct
-- a living hell.

Having such silly "magic" guessing stuff is actually detrimental to the
whole concept of properly identifying and using character sets.
Everything about the thought makes me shiver.

Cheers,
Johannes

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