> On 25 Aug 2015, at 16:01, Guillermo Polito <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi guys,
> 
> I was having a deep look today at Locale, LanguageEnvironment and 
> EncodedCharset with the objective of understanding it and see how we can 
> organize it better.
> 
> As I saw, in almost all cases, it happened that the locale and language 
> environment are only used to get the current system's encoding. Even, it is 
> not that the system's encoding is obtained from the system's configuration 
> but guessed. Also, I saw that the usage of leadingCharacter is very limited 
> in the image and I'd say that most of the time we would not be using it: we 
> will be using unicode.
> 
> I proposed in the issue tracker a change in three steps that cleans up this:
> - Cleaning Locale's API 
> (https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/16379/Cleanup-Locale-API)
> - Fix users to make use of this new API 
> (https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/16380/Make-use-of-new-Locale-API)
> - Remove old unused code 
> (https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/16381/Removed-unused-Locale-code)

Yes, that seems the way to go.

> I know that with this change we lose temporarily the ability to use other 
> language environments (like greek or japanese), and thus, change to other 
> system encodings that are not UTF8/16/32.

Why do you say that ? As far as I understand it, we would not lose anything at 
all !

Leading char is a hack that does not seem to exist in other programming 
languages. AFAIU, it is only needed because there are (might/used to be) a 
couple (a very small number) of Unicode characters shared between 3 languages 
(I believe Japanese, Korean, and maybe Chinese) where the interpretation of the 
same Unicode character depends on the language. But I am totally not sure it 
really is such a big deal, I could be wrong though.

Still, since we do UTF-8 (and some variations, as well as many byte encodings), 
I am pretty sure we support almost anything out there.

> However, I believe that we should not 'guess' the system converter from the 
> system language but to ask the system the encoding it is using. And this 
> should maybe be added as a primitive (as the others already existing in the 
> Locale class for example).

> If somebody could review these issues or has some comment on something that I 
> should not be aware of, I'd be grateful :).
> 
> Guille


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