Re: Display types?

[nisse@lysator.liu.se (Niels Möller)]

Eric Grosse <ehg@research.bell-labs.com> writes:

> Ron Rivest wrote:
> >     (1) [Display types] allow the use of names over a non-Latin alphabet
> > My personal opinion is that (1) makes them worth the extra trouble...
> 
> Can we drop display types and declare that the name is UTF8?  That gets us
> both an international alphabet and a simple syntax.

I _strongly_ dislike that idea. Using a display type or similar say
that a particular string is in UTF8 is just fine. 

But making it the default, and at the same time *remove* the option to
use anything else, that is plain evil. UTF8 is reasonable as a
_transport_ encoding, but wherever you have a system or application
that uses some suitable local 8-bit character set (like I do
currently) _or_ 16-bit characters (like I hope to be doing in the not
too distant future), dealing with UTF8 is a pain.

Again, UTF8 is useful as a transport encoding for global use (whenever
a wide-char communication is unavailable). But I want to be able to
use sexp and spki also for local stuff, and I definitely do *not* want
that to require use of UTF8.

Please, don't do that.

Regards,
/Niels Möller

---

References:

• Display types?
• From: Ron Rivest <rivest@theory.lcs.mit.edu>
• Re: Display types?
• From: Eric Grosse <ehg@research.bell-labs.com>

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