Assignment Versus Equality

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>:

> On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 10:48 pm, Rustom Mody wrote:
>
>> PS Google Groups is wise enough to jump through hoops trying to
>> encode my message above as latin-1, then as Windows 1252 and only
>> when that does not work as UTF-8
>
> There is nothing admirable about GG (or any other newsreader or email
> client) defaulting to legacy encodings like Latin-1 and especially not
> Windows 1252.
>
> Certainly the user should be permitted to explicitly set the encoding,
> but otherwise the program should default to UTF-8.

The users should be completely oblivious to such technicalities as
character encodings.

As for those technicalities, a MIME-compliant client is free to use any
well-defined, widely-used character encoding as long as it is properly
declared.


Marko