David Leuschner wrote:

If I write simple program just printing a non-ASCII string to the terminal or to a file I'd expect that I can read it on the screen or using my favorite text editor without having change anything -- neither in my terminal nor in my program. When I run the program on my platform don't mind if somebody else might get differently encoded output from the same program as long as I get what I expect.

I think this is sensible advice. Furthermore I want to be able to chose an encoding (e.g. by setting my environment), even for file/socket IO, instead of being locked into utf-8. Thus, for Linux, I'd say always use the environment encoding. More advanced stuff like sending in a certain encoding e.g. over network or to a foreign file system should not use H98 IO but newer libraries that allow to set the encoding programmatically, or encode yourself and read/write Word8. Cheers Ben