erik quanstrom wrote: > i think the devolution of gnu grep is quite instructive. ... > it gets to the heart of why plan9's invention and use (thank's rob, ken) of > utf-8 is so great.
If the problem is that Gnu grep converts any non-8-bit character set to wchar_t (the equivalent of Plan 9 "rune"), then it's not really a fair criticism of the software. The conversion approach handles a wide variety of character encoding scheme, whereas grepping the encodings directly (the fast approach) doesn't work well for many non-UTF-8 encodings.
