For those of you curious on how the idea of moving Unix completely to UTF-8 started out originally, I highly recommend to read the 1992 USENIX paper "Hello World or Καλημέρα κόσμε" by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson: ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/doc/ISO/charsets/UTF-8-Plan9-paper.ps.gz The terminology in the paper is somewhat antique, because UTF-8 was at the time still a proposal called FSS-UTF (or UTF-2), and ISO DIS 10646 and Unicode were not yet essentially the same standard, but apart from that, the authors understood already perfectly well, that in the end the only feasible solution is to replace ASCII *completely* and at all levels by UTF-8, without any new awkward stateful encodings and character set identification/conversion layers, which the fathers of Unix then did successfully within a very short time in their new Plan 9 operating system. The result was as elegant and useful as you would expect. That's were we will hopefully be soon with Linux as well ... Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
